(Not) The End Of The World
by prepare4trouble
Summary: Aziraphale falls, and while Crowley can't exactly catch him, he does what he can to help him find his feet again.
1. Chapter 1

They needed to leave. They needed not to be here anymore. In fact, they needed never to have been here at all.

Crowley's arms were still wrapped tightly around Aziraphale in the exact way that he had awkwardly grabbed him as the angel had begun to slip down, between the molecules that made up the world. They were on solid ground now, no longer falling. Not safe, exactly, but there was nowhere else for them to go. He loosened his grip, then finally let go completely.

He looked around.

They were in Hell. Of that he was certain; there was nowhere else that they could possibly be. Although it was some corner of Hell that Crowley had never seen before, or at least did not remember seeing. That was understandable. It was a big place; at least as big as the world itself.

It was dark. That, in and of itself was unremarkable; it was often dark in Hell, but it was _very_ dark here. And cold. Hell was rarely cold. It had a reputation on Earth of being a place of fire, and that was justified. Although hellfire didn't burn on every corner, it usually kept the place from acquiring this kind of a chill. There was an unpleasant dampness seeping through the fabric of his jeans. It soaked into his skin, and felt as though if he didn't move, it would eventually keep going, to permeate his entire being.

They needed to go.

He climbed to his feet, ignoring the bruises from the impact with the cold, hard ground. "Get up," he said. He kept his voice as quiet as he could, but still it sounded like a shout over the silence around them.

Somewhere behind him, he heard the scuttling of rats. Maybe nothing, but maybe the messengers of some minor demon looking to make a name for itself. Or worse, some demon that already had, and that wanted to keep favour.

"Angel, we can't stay here. Get up," he whispered. He reached down, grabbed hold of Aziraphale's arm, and tugged as hard as he was able. The angel remained where he was, lying on the ground in something like a foetal position. He whimpered softly.

Crowley tried again. This time he crouched down to the damp ground and placed his arms around the angel's body again. He lifted with all his strength, and this time, Aziraphale began to stand. "It hurts," he whispered. His voice was hoarse from screaming; he had screamed all the way down, and his face was damp with tears.

"I know. But we have to _go,_" Crowley told him. They should be gone already. Before someone came. They couldn't be found here. He doubted that Hell knew they were there, which meant the only way the could find out would be for someone to spot them, and Crowley didn't even want to think about what would happen to them in that case.

Aziraphale went with him, reluctantly putting one foot in front of the other as Crowley half-carried him down the cavernous corridor with no real destination in mind. He cursed to himself under his breath, cursing Heaven, for letting this happen, Hell for being there to catch them, and both sides at the same time for the war that had set this whole thing in motion.

"Where…?" Aziraphale began.

"I'm trying to find a way out," he explained. He turned to look at Aziraphale, and almost stopped in his tracks. The angel's eyes were open now, but they were not Aziraphale's eyes. Where before they had appeared almost human, now they were pure black. No iris, no visible pupil or sclera, simply an expanse of black, as dark as the pit.

Crowley tightened his grip, his arm ran behind the angel's back and underneath both of his arms. He moved himself a little closer, and didn't look again.

Maybe it was his imagination. Low light did strange things even to vision that had been designed for it. "Keep moving," he said. "Don't stop. We're nearly there."

He had no idea where they were, or how far they were from the exit. All he knew was that moving was better than staying still, and that based on his knowledge of Hell, if he kept doing what he was doing, sooner or later, he was going to find one of the back ways out. The longer they remained in Hell, the more chance there was of someone realising who they were, and why they were there.

Several times, Aziraphale's knees buckled and he almost brought both of them to the ground, but every time, he appeared to find some strength he hadn't known that he possessed, and allowed Crowley to keep leading him through the back alleys and deserted parts of Hell that not even the lowliest demon wanted to tread.

The whole time they walked, Crowley couldn't keep one particular thought from his mind. It was a Wednesday.

He had never particularly liked Wednesdays. If something bad was going to happen, it almost invariably chose a Wednesday to do it. Pompeii had erupted on a Wednesday, and that had been a very bad day. He'd been given less than an hour's notice to get out of town, and it had been impossible to save more than the dozen or so that he had managed to get out. It had also been a Wednesday when he and Aziraphale had had their disagreement about holy water that had cost them years of friendship. And it had been a Wednesday when they had first come to realise that the boy Warlock was not, and never had been, the antichrist, and that they had spent years trying to influence the wrong boy.

So Wednesdays, generally speaking, were not Crowley's favourite day, and he couldn't help feeling that he should have known that something was going to happen.

They had spent months waiting for the other shoe to drop. Months laying low, waiting for either Heaven or Hell to make their move, and for months nothing had happened. Crowley had started to believe that maybe they really were safe.

That too, he supposed, should probably have tipped him off.

Aziraphale was trembling. His skin was hot to the touch, as though he was burning up inside. Which, actually, was completely accurate. Crowley could feel the heat through the layers of his shirt and jacket. In comparison, the air was freezing, but Crowley didn't think it was the relative difference in temperature that was bothering him

He tried to imagine being forced to get up and flee after what the angel had just gone through, and he couldn't. After his own experience, he remembered lying on the ground, unable to bring himself to move for the pain that seemed to touch every part of him. He had lain there for days, or possibly even for years. Time had less meaning then, because technically, it hadn't been invented yet.

They ploughed on, Crowley almost carrying Aziraphale as he put all of his concentration into putting one foot in front of the other, searching for a back entrance to sneak out through.

He finally found one at the end of a long corridor so dark that to human eyes, and possibly to angel eyes, it would appear that there was no light at all. The humidity was less there too; the dampness in the air eased and it began to feel fresher. The door looked as though it had not opened in millennia. He didn't want to put the angel down to push it open, but it was heavy and he had no choice. Aziraphale was in no shape to help, and holding onto him would have made it impossible to turn the handle and push.

He placed Aziraphale on the floor, sitting up, with his back against the wall. The angel took a shaking breath, and slumped forward. Crowley turned away and put all of his concentration and strength into opening the door.

He called upon a demonic miracle the moment they were out of Hell, and brought them directly to the bookshop. It was risky, that was the kind of thing that could get noticed, but it was all that he could think of. The alternative was to claw their way up to Earth under their own power, and then make their own way back, and that would have been impossible in the circumstances.

He toyed with the idea of bringing them to his place, he at least had a bed where the angel could rest comfortably, but he wanted Aziraphale to be somewhere familiar. It would… he didn't know if it would help, but it wouldn't hurt.

He didn't think.

Unless, of course, it would hurt even more.


	2. Chapter 2

Not only did Aziraphale not have a bed, he also didn't seem to have a sofa. Crowley stared around in frustration, and found only chairs, some made of wood, others padded and upholstered, but every one of them designed for sitting in a more or less upright position, probably while reading a book and drinking cocoa.

He shouldn't have been surprised. And he wasn't, not really. What he was, was frustrated, tired, and aching from the exertion of carrying the angel through Hell. He needed somewhere to deposit him, somewhere where he would be able to lay down, and Crowley didn't want it to be the floor.

He spotted an old, upholstered wooden chair, and with a quick miracle, he stretched it into something resembling a sofa. He had a feeling Aziraphale was going to be mad at him when he saw what had happened to his antique furniture, but right now, Crowley didn't care.

And besides, maybe Aziraphale wouldn't be mad. He had no idea what this was going to do to him. Whoever stepped out of the other side might not be the kind of person that even liked antique furniture. Or books.

He didn't want to think about that. He carefully deposited the angel on the newly formed sofa. Aziraphale's eyes were tightly closed, face screwed up as though he was resting fitfully. There was a thin layer of sweat on his brow, and his hair was beginning to stick to it. He shivered.

Crowley reached down and carefully brushed the hair from his face. Aziraphale whimpered as though even that light contact hurt him. He was still hot to the touch, perhaps even more now than when he had been in Hell. It was like a fever tearing through his body, burning away what he had been, changing him into something new.

His eyes slipped half open and once again, Crowley saw that inky black abyss, so much more noticeable than it had been in Hell. Crowley froze, caught between staring and looking away. It was still Aziraphale, but it was not.

"Crowley? What's…?" Aziraphale asked, and he sounded so afraid, and so broken, that Crowley couldn't stand it.

"It's okay angel," he said. "I'm here," and then he promptly disappeared into the cellar, found himself the best bottle of wine that he could, and downed it straight from the bottle.

* * *

Crowley shuddered, lost in a memory. It was not one that he visited often, and never deliberately. It was a memory, overridingly, of pain. It had begun as a tingling between his wings, and spread in moments to engulf his entire being. It felt like burning; he could feel the flames consuming him, incinerating him from the inside out. He remembered screaming as pain had become his entire world. He had barely even registered the sensation of falling, as Heaven had let him go and sent him into freefall, spinning wildly as he, and those around him plummeted out of Heaven, and down into Hell.

He remembered the impact, and he remembered the moans of pain and confusion around him. He remembered the pain slowly subsiding, replaced by a heavy feeling of loss. He remembered discovering what had been done to him; the changes forced upon his celestial body. He remembered crying out for forgiveness for his transgressions, to be met by nothing but silence.

Nothing dulled the memory. Not even time. And now Aziraphale would have his own to match.

Crowley had sensed what was about to happen before it came, but only a split second before; not enough time to even really work out what it was that he was sensing, and certainly not enough time to shout out a warning.

Even if there had been time to form words, he wasn't sure he would have known what, precisely, to shout. Even now, with time to think about it, he couldn't come up with a suitable warning that would have accurately conveyed the danger. Anyway, he reasoned, it wasn't as though a warning would have made any difference to the outcome; it wasn't like it was something Aziraphale could have avoided by ducking, or stepping slightly to the left.

Crowley though, being Crowley, wasn't going to let a little thing like there having been nothing he could do, stop him from wallowing in self loathing for it. He supposed, if he really thought about it, the whole thing was technically his fault anyway.

The alcohol in the wine was doing its job, but not as well as he had hoped. The room was spinning, but he was still conscious, still lost in unwelcome memories. He tried instead to think of what had come after. After the fallen angels, the newly created demons, had dragged themselves up from the ground and formed themselves into some kind of a hierarchy, when he had discovered that Hell was, basically, the same as Heaven. The same bureaucracy, the same targets for souls claimed. The only difference was that, now that the whole 'creation' thing was done and life had started to settle into some kind of a rhythm, being a demon was probably a lot more fun than being an angel.

Well, apart from the sense of loss that still endured.

He couldn't say for certain, it might be the alcohol talking, but maybe things weren't as bad as they appeared. Sure, it was going to be difficult for him at first, but it wasn't like Aziraphale was the first angel this had happened to, and most of the others got on okay, once they accepted their lot. Plus, Aziraphale had him, which was something that no fallen angel before had ever had.

Yes, things were going to be fine.

But before that, of course, they were going to be terrible.

The sound of Aziraphale beginning to stir, snapped Crowley to instant alertness. He put down the bottle and forced himself to sober up. Unfortunately, with sobriety came that uneasy feeling of the calm before the metaphorical storm. Clumsily, he picked himself up from the floor and approached the angel. There were two ways this could go; either Aziraphale would still be — more or less — himself, or he wouldn't.

"Aziraphale," he said. He kept his voice as low and as calm as he could, but he could still hear the apprehension in it.

Aziraphale winced as though there was a sudden, intense, pain in his head. Moving sluggishly, like someone waking from a long sleep, he rolled onto his back, pressed his palms into his forehead and cried out in pain.

Crowley was at his side in a fraction of a second. As the pain appeared to subside, he gently helped him into a sitting position. Aziraphale reluctantly allowed Crowley to move him, obviously still tender from the… from what had happened.

Crowley reached behind him, to the nearest table, and grabbed a glass of water that had not been there a moment earlier. "Drink this," he suggested. He didn't know whether it would help, but it felt like the right thing to do.

Their hands touched as he handed it over. Aziraphale's were still trembling a little, but as Crowley helped him guide the cup to his lips, he realised that the burning had ceased. His skin was still a little warmer than Crowley would have expected, but the fire inside him had died down to embers. Perhaps it would cool further, perhaps not. Time would tell.

He watched as Aziraphale took a sip. The angel pushed the glass back to Crowley, and Crowley examined the angel for physical changes. He could see none, apart from the eyes. Completely black, like the sky on a cloudy night when he couldn't see the stars. He found himself staring into them, unable to look away. He had never seen eyes quite like it. He stared harder, trying to force himself to get used to them, until he remembered that Aziraphale didn't even know what the transformation had done to him. He looked away then, a stab of anger and grief hitting him square in the chest.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

Aziraphale didn't answer.

"Aziraphale?" Crowley said. Aziraphale flinched hard, like Crowley had struck him. His hands rushed to his head again. He didn't cry out this time, but it was clear that it still hurt.

"I don't know," Aziraphale said. It still sounded like him. A version of him that had literally been to Hell and back, and was feeling a little worse for wear, but still him. "Better than I did, but…" he paused, then looked around the room as though searching for something. "But wrong." He folded his arms tightly across his body. "Empty. Something's missing." He took a deep, shaky breath. "What did I lose?"

Crowley didn't have to try hard to remember that feeling. It was still with him; it always would be. An absence that had followed him through Hell and Earth. He reached for the angel, wanting to take his hands, to show him that he wasn't as alone as he felt, but Aziraphale pulled back.

"Don't worry about it," Crowley said. It was more of a prayer than a request; a plea to anybody that might be listening to grant a short respite. Aziraphale nodded and made a visible effort to banish the thoughts from his mind.

With those pure black eyes, it was impossible to see them move. It appeared as if they remained completely still even as he looked around the room. It was disconcerting. Crowley tried not to think about it. It wasn't important; he would get used to it.

And so would Aziraphale, though he suspected that might take a little longer.

He reached for the water again, and offered it to the angel. Aziraphale took it for himself this time, and raised it to his lips without help. As their hands briefly touched, Crowley felt that the trembling had lessened. He drank the water down in several gulps, then placed the empty glass on the floor by his feet.

The angel took a deep breath and began to stare around the room in apparent confusion. It looked as though he was looking at everything, like there was something about it that was wrong. As though it was the shop, and not himself, that was different.

"What happened?" he asked.

Crowley froze. Aziraphale didn't know.

He didn't know.

It was one thing not to understand the emptiness that he was feeling, not to instinctively know it for what it was. It was one thing not to know about the thankfully relatively minor changes to his appearance, but he had at least thought Aziraphale understood what had happened to him.

Crowley didn't want to be the one to have to tell him.

He thought again of his own fall. Of the pain; the burning as his wings blackened. The sensation of being cast out, of falling; literally falling, through the Heavens and into Hell. He remembered the agony of being remade, of changing; being reshaped into something new. He remembered confusion, and desperately trying to regain what he had lost until he had finally realised that it was impossible.

He hadn't understood at the time either. None of them had, because it had never happened before.

He remembered a seemingly endless night spent on the ground, praying to a God that no longer believed in him, begging for forgiveness because the empty place inside of him hurt more than the fall ever could.

Aziraphale reached for him, grabbed his hands and held them tight until Crowley relented and looked at him, straight into his new, black, eyes.

"Say it," Aziraphale begged.

Crowley understood then. He knew, he just… needed to hear it. Needed to hear the words.

He couldn't speak. Everything he was feeling was so wrapped up in painful memories. He opened his mouth and no sound came out.

"Crowley, please," Aziraphale said.

Crowley tried to force out the words. They came out hoarse and every bit as broken as he felt. "You…" he took a breath. "Angel, you fell."

"Oh." Aziraphale closed his eyes. He pulled his hands back from Crowley's once again, and slumped forward as though somebody — as though Crowley — had cut his strings. He emitted a low moan that sounded as though his heart was breaking.

Crowley held back, unsure what to do. There was nothing he could do. Nothing that would help, at least. Nothing that he could say that would make it any better, nothing that could take away the pain of the loss, of the transformation. He didn't try. Instead, he simply took the seat next to the ange… former angel, and sat in silence, waiting.


	3. Chapter 3

Although he had become much more aware of its passage over the past eleven years or so, as the countdown to armageddon had begun to tick menacingly in the background, time wasn't something that, in general, Crowley paid a great deal of attention to. It was a side-effect of immortality, he supposed. He had literally all the time in the world, and he didn't want to waste it counting minutes. And so it felt odd to him how very aware he had been of the passage of time as he had sat, next to Aziraphale, waiting, and feeling very useless.

Well, until the physical exertion and emotional trauma of the past couple of hours, combined with the alcohol that he hadn't completely purged from his system, drove him to slip into a light slumber around half an hour in. He didn't actually remember dozing off, but it was brought to his attention the moment he snapped to confused alertness at the sound of someone moving around his flat.

He had been surprised, on opening his eyes, to find himself not in his flat at all, but at Aziraphale's place. Not in the shop itself, but in the back, where they sometimes liked to do their drinking. Blissful confusion had lasted only a couple of seconds before he remembered what was happening and turned instinctively to look at the place next to him, where Aziraphale had been sitting.

He found the other half of the sofa empty. A stab of panic drove him to his feet as he stared wildly around the room, searching for the ang…for the dem… for his best friend.

"Over here."

Crowley turned to find Aziraphale standing awkwardly in a doorway, arms folded, watching him. He relaxed. "Oh. Good. You're… over there," he muttered, still trying to get his bearings.

Aziraphale nodded. He was leaning against the doorframe, an apprehensive look on his face. He glanced around him nervously, as though he expected to be jumped at any time.

"They don't know," Crowley said. "I think we got out before anybody noticed." Thank… well, someone for small mercies. Not Heaven though. Never them.

Aziraphale nodded slowly. He took a step forward, into the room. "What exactly happened?" he asked.

No. No, Crowley had already done that once, and it had been hard enough to tell him the first time. He didn't want to have to say it again. But Aziraphale was looking at him, waiting for a response.

Was short term memory loss a side-effect of falling? He didn't remember it being. But then if it was, he wouldn't remember, would he?

He sighed, and braced himself. "You really don't remember?"

A pause. Aziraphale looked away. "Yes. I do. I know… that part. I meant, you were with me. How?"

Oh. Well, honestly, Crowley wasn't sure. He had grabbed hold and not let go, with no clue what that would actually do to either one of them. He supposed that in the back of his mind, he had been hoping that perhaps he would be able to keep Aziraphale there, as though his own body, on earth, could act as an anchor and hold the angel where he was. Instead, he had fallen with him, plummeting down to Hell for a second time.

"I just held on really tight," he said. "Like a… whatever it's called." He frowned as the word escaped him, it wasn't important, but he liked to get his point across, and it had been a good analogy. Or it would have been, if he could have thought of the right word. "Sea thing," he added, lamely. "You get them on boats."

Aziraphale nodded, as though that explanation made any kind of sense. And maybe it did, it was what had happened, after all. The angel took a step closer, apprehension and uncertainty written both in his face and in the way he moved. He smiled, but it wasn't genuine. Crowley could tell. He had never once seen Aziraphale fake an emotion; it was impossible for him because everything he felt and everything he thought was written on his face for all the world to see, as long as they knew how to read it. While he might be smiling now, Crowley could see the terror behind it.

"Honestly," the angel said, "I never realised that the 'falling' part would be so literal."

Crowley nodded. "Yeah, it's pretty literal." Literal, figurative and everything in between. "Listen, Aziraphale, you…" he began, but stopped as Aziraphale cried out in sudden pain.

Before Crowley could reach him, the angel was doubled over, his head in his hands and his eyes screwed tightly closed. Crowley guided him back to the sofa and sat him down again. He snaked his arm around the angel's back and left it there, careful not to apply any pressure to skin that was likely still sensitive. The burns may not show on the outside, but they would be there.

"It'll pass, okay? Give it a minute," he said. His hand moved up and down Aziraphale's back, close to where his wings would be if he unfurled them. He very deliberately didn't think about how they would be changed too now; as dark as his own. He continued caressing in a gentle rhythm as the angel slowly recovered from the sudden onslaught of pain.

He felt a little of the tension in Aziraphale's muscles ease as the angel's head lifted slowly and he turned to look at Crowley. Crowley looked back, into deep black eyes that chilled him to the bone.

"I don't think that's my name anymore," Aziraphale whispered.

Oh. Crowley felt his eyes widen in understanding as a long-lost memory almost returned. He had forgotten that part; deliberately forgotten it. Once, he had had a different name, but he barely remembered it anymore. He had banished it from his thoughts, deliberately pushed it from his consciousness, because it hadn't been his anymore. It had been taken from him when he had been cast out, and it had hurt even to think the word.

He closed his eyes and silently cursed his stupidity. How many times had he said the angel's name since they had returned from Hell? How much pain had he caused?

"No," he said simply. "It's not."

"Well then," Aziraphale took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, as though trying to calm himself. "I… suppose I'd better come up with a new one."

Crowley shook his head in frustration. This wasn't fair.

Crowley, like all demons, had been re-named in Hell. As Aziraphale no doubt would have been, had he been discovered there. It would most likely have been something demeaning and cruel. Crowley had rejected the name they had given him and taken one for himself. Aziraphale would be able to do the same, but he shouldn't have to. None of this should be happening.

"I'm going to kill them," Crowley muttered. "I'm going to march into Heaven armed with Hellfire and I'm going to…" he tailed off, knowing it was an empty threat, and that it wouldn't help anything. But if he ever ran into the Archangel Gabriel, Crowley couldn't be held accountable for his actions.

Aziraphale… or whatever he was called now… leaned forward and placed his head in his hands. He ran his fingers through his hair, and hissed in pain — not a snake hiss, but a very human sound of unexpected pain. He pulled his hands away, looked down at them, and gasped in horror. "Oh," he said.

Crowley followed his gaze and noticed for the first time that where there had previously been perfectly manicured fingernails, the angel now had something else. Yellowing nails ending in razor-sharp tips that looked as though they had been carefully sharpened into weapons. The his left index fingernail was red with Aziraphale's own blood, and blood was beginning to congeal in his hair where he had nicked his scalp. Aziraphale flexed his fingers, staring down at them in apparent disbelief, as though he couldn't believe that they were his.

"Oh," he said again, then folded his hands together, enclosing the nails inside them, hiding them from view.

Crowley felt something inside him twist. "Oh yeah, they look a bit sharp," he breezed, as though this kind of thing happened every day. He waved a hand over the side of Aziraphale's head, healing the wound as he went, then cleaned up the rest of the blood. "That's okay. We can do something about that." He didn't know what, but he knew that there had do be something. "Nothing a manicure can't fix," he added.

"They're hideous."

Carefully, so as not to cut himself, Crowley took Aziraphale's hands in his own. He straightened the fingers and examined them carefully. "They're not," he said. And they really weren't. They weren't horrible, or even particularly demonic-looking. They were just different than he was used to.

There was going to be a lot of that going around.

Aziraphale continued to stare down at his hands with a distraught expression, and Crowley couldn't help but think that if this was how the angel reacted to needing a manicure, he wasn't going to cope well with the other, much more noticeable change.

He should tell him. He didn't want to tell him, but he should. It felt as though it would be kicking him when he was down, but the alternative was to wait, and that might be even worse. He imagined Aziraphale recovering some of his equilibrium, only to be thrown even further off-balance by another revelation.

Of course, there was another option; to say nothing, and allow the angel to discover it for himself, it would be easier, but Crowley couldn't do that to him. It would be beyond cruel.

There was only one real option, then. He squeezed Aziraphale's hands lightly, and then let go. "Okay, don't freak out, but there's… something else," he said.

Aziraphale looked up to meet Crowley's gaze with eyes that he didn't yet know were different. Crowley looked away. He bit his lip and he reached behind himself and produced a mirror.

Aziraphale hesitated before he took it with a reluctance that was almost palpable. He didn't look. Instead, he placed it on his knee, reflective side down. He left it there for a long time, waiting, as though working up the nerve, until the nightmare in his head was probably worse than the reality. Finally, slowly, he turned it over, lifted it slightly, and looked down.

He stared, unmoving and unblinking, not even breathing, at his reflection in the mirror. Finally, he lowered the mirror, still without saying a word, placed it on the sofa next to him, and got to his feet.

He turned away, cleared his throat, and made an effort to brush the creases from the crumpled and stained suit that he was wearing. "Crowley, I'm sorry but I rather think I would like to be alone."

"It's not as bad as you think." Crowley said, and instantly regretted it.

Aziraphale wasn't stupid, quite the opposite. He knew exactly how bad it was, and he probably knew that it was a problem that had a solution. He just needed time. Time to process and to think, not just about his appearance, but about everything.

And he probably didn't want an audience to do it.

The word he had been searching for earlier forced its way into Crowley's mind unexpectedly. "It's barnacles, by the way. That's what holds on tight to things," he said.

"Crowley, please. Leave." Aziraphale folded his arms, muscles tense and rigid, and waited.

Crowley flinched, but nodded. "Yeah. Okay. I won't be far away."

He moved to touch Aziraphale on the arm as he walked past, but the former angel sensed him coming and moved out of his reach. His hand passed instead through empty air.

"Here," he said. He removed his sunglasses and placed them carefully on a table as he walked away. "In case you… you know."

Aziraphale didn't reply. Crowley let himself out into the street and closed the door firmly behind him.

It was dark outside, and the street was deserted. Crowley placed his back against the door of the shop and slid down to the ground, hooked his arms around his knees and sat on the cold, hard concrete of the floor.

Inside the shop, he heard a moan of anguish; not a scream or a sob, but something in-between the two. It was a sound of pain, of confusion and loss, of fear and of loneliness, and it was all Crowley could do not to go back inside and wrap the angel in his arms.

He resisted, slumped forward to rest his head on his knees, and waited. He would give Aziraphale time, but only up to a point.

* * *

_If you're enjoying, I'd appreciate it s much if you'd let me know. Comments feed the author ;-)_


	4. Chapter 4

Crowley supposed he could have waited in the Bentley. It was parked right outside, where it definitely shouldn't have been parked, adorned with a wheel clamp and a parking ticket. He would have been a lot more comfortable in there, and there might even have been a chance to grab some shut-eye while he waited.

He decided against it. The floor outside the shop was hard and cold, and not at all conducive to a good night's sleep, but at least he knew that if he sat with his back to the door, there was no possibility of Aziraphale leaving without him noticing.

Despite the relative quietness of the street outside the shop, the city, and particularly this part of the city, never really slept, and so he was subjected to a constant stream of passers by; some returning home from a night of drinking and dancing, surrounded by the odour of sweat and alcohol, while others headed out to work for the early shift.

One man, assuming Crowley to be a sleeping drunk, tried to reach into his pocket to steal his wallet.

He had regretted that decision.

It had grown quiet inside the shop now. For a time, he had been aware of Aziraphale moving around. Now, the angel had either settled down somewhere, or he was taking care to be quiet. At least the other sound had stopped. Crowley didn't think he would have been able to stay outside for long listening to that.

He cracked an eye open and looked up at the sky. Dawn was approaching, and the London skyline was brightening, buildings coming further into view as the sun slowly rose on a new day. Crowley closed his eyes again. Without his sunglasses, he felt exposed. He supposed he should have gotten another pair out of the glove compartment of his car, but to do that would have meant abandoning his post at the door.  
He didn't know how long to leave Aziraphale alone. The angel hadn't told him what he needed, and Crowley supposed that probably meant he should stay away until he was invited back, but after almost three hours of waiting, he was beginning to think that wasn't going to happen. Besides, it was uncomfortable on the floor, and his back was beginning to ache.

The foot traffic passing the shop had been steadily increasing for the past hour or so, more people going to work than heading home now, and although it was still reasonably quiet, the street was going to get busy soon. Too busy for camping out outside a bookshop, anyway. When that happened, Crowley would have no choice but to go back inside, or leave.

And he wasn't going to leave.

A woman hurrying down the street in heels that she didn't know how to walk in, almost tripped over him as she stared at the screen of her phone. She carried on her way without even turning back. Crowley glared after her, and with a quick demonic miracle, made sure the heel of one of her shoes caught in a drain. She almost fell to the floor, saved herself, but dropped her phone. Crowley heard a satisfying crack as the screen shattered.

She would be in a bad mood all day. Possibly even all week. He grinned to himself as he thought of all that anger rubbing off on the people around her, who would find themselves angry and frustrated and pass it on like a ripple of ill-will throughout the city. He might not be directly in the business of winning souls for Hell anymore, but that didn't mean it wasn't fun to freelance once in a while.

Well, that decided it. If clumsy Londoners were going to start tripping over him, he needed not to be sitting with his eyes closed outside a bookshop in the middle of Soho anymore. He got slowly to his feet as muscles protested. His bruises still ached from the landing in Hell, not to mention the toll that sitting on the hard ground had taken. There were definite disadvantages to wearing a human body sometimes.

He stretched some of the ache out of his back, brushed most of the dust from the ground off his jeans, then opened the door and let himself inside. He locked it behind him, then glanced around at an empty shop. "Az…" he began, then remembered and clenched his jaw shut to stop himself before he could say the name. "Angel?" he called instead. It wasn't accurate anymore, but then he had never really been using it as a description of what Aziraphale was.

There was no response. He kept walking, through the shelves filled with rare books, and into the back of the shop; the area where customers were forbidden to enter without an invitation. There, he found himself looking at the back of Aziraphale's head as the angel sat at a desk, leaning forward to read, completely absorbed in whatever was on the page.

On the desk next to him, pushed far enough away from his books that he couldn't accidentally knock it over and damage them, was a mug of something, probably tea. Instead of a handle, the mug bore two angel wings in white, like some cruel joke.

It was disconcerting for a moment, because with his back to Crowley, it looked just like Aziraphale from before, as though everything was fine, and the events of the day before hadn't happened.

Crowley took a step closer. On hearing his approach, the angel turned to look at him. He hadn't put on the sunglasses. Bizarrely, what he had put on was the old pair of reading glasses that he didn't need. There was no prescription in them, just plain glass. They were an affectation. He wore them because he liked them; he liked the image they portrayed.

An image that was altered slightly by the inky black eyes behind them.

"Hey," Crowley said. "I hope you don't mind me coming back. It's just getting a little… people-y out there, you know?"

Aziraphale closed his book, removed the reading glasses and placed them on the desk next to it. He turned to look at him again. "Crowley," he said. He turned away again self-consciously, eyes looking downward in an attempt to disguise his eyes, then he appeared to make a deliberate decision not to do that. He turned again and met Crowley's eyes with a steady gaze. "Of course I don't mind. I'm sorry," he said.

Crowley frowned, unsure what exactly the angel was apologising for.

"For making you leave," Aziraphale explained. "It was… I was…" he shook his head and looked away again. "I needed some time."

"I know; it's fine," Crowley assured him.

He glanced around the room, looking for anything out of the ordinary, but everything looked exactly as he had left it, including the ridiculously stretched chair that apparently Aziraphale hadn't bothered to fix. There was no indication that the angel had used his alone time to fall into a fit of rage at the injustice of it all, or given in to the urge to break something. It was a relief, but not a surprise; it wasn't in his nature, and apparently that was something that even becoming a demon wouldn't change.

Crowley was reasonably sure that if their positions had been reversed, he might have used the time to do just that; to rage, to scream. It wouldn't have helped, but it might have made him feel a little better for a moment or two.

Actually, he wanted to break things anyway, and if he had been anywhere other than here, surrounded by things that Aziraphale loved, he might have given in to the urge.

"What is it?" Aziraphale asked, following Crowley's gaze around the room.

He shrugged. "Nothing, just admiring your self control. I think I'd have at least punched a couple of walls."

"I don't do that," Aziraphale said, then frowned. "Crowley, I'm still me."

"I know. Of course you are."

The angel shook his head. "No, that's not what I mean. I mean, I still feel like myself. I didn't think… I thought when an angel fell, it changed more than their physical form."

Sometimes it did. Some had woken up different, changed, crueller, but most were the same people they had always been, just changed physically, then cut off from heaven and discarded. It was that that had changed them, but that change had happened later. And it wasn't going to happen to Aziraphale; Crowley was going to make sure of that.

"It doesn't change who you are," he said. "Falling's supposed to be a punishment, angel. If it changed you like that, you'd be someone else, and it wouldn't be much of a punishment if it happened to somebody else."

But then, that wasn't true, was it? Or else it wouldn't hurt this much to have to watch it.

He perched awkwardly on the nearest chair. "Are you…" he began, then stopped. He had been going to ask whether Aziraphale was okay, or if he was feeling better, but he was reasonably sure that he wasn't, no matter how it might look on the surface. He couldn't possibly be. "What were you doing?" he asked instead.

"Oh, just reading." Aziraphale pushed the large, heavy tome away from him, and Crowley couldn't help but notice how his gaze lingered on his hands as he did. He reached for another book and placed it on top of the one he had been reading, hiding it from view. "My vision has changed." He said it almost like it was an afterthought; some throwaway, unimportant comment.

It wasn't. Crowley saw instantly through the facade of calm. "What do you mean?" he asked

Aziraphale closed his eyes. "Colours," he said. "They're… wrong. It's difficult to describe. These eyes must be…" he hesitated again. "Broken?"

Crowley got to his feet again. He crossed the room and placed a hand gently on Aziraphale's shoulder. The former angel stiffened in surprise, but didn't push him away. "They're not broken," Crowley told him. "Just different. It happens." He wasn't surprised. It made sense with such a huge change to the appearance of the eyes that the internal structure would be different too.

It was the same with him. He had never been to Earth before he had fallen — he had spent most of his time among the stars — but he could tell from observation that there were differences between how he perceived the world, and how Aziraphale did, and other differences between himself and the humans around him. He suspected that Angels could see so much more than the average human, and that demon eyes were, for the most part, set up to cope in the low-light of Hell.

That explained Heaven's colour theme, which had felt much less uninspiring and plain when he had lived among them.

"Is it bad?" he asked.

"It's… No, but it's going to take some getting used to."

Crowley gripped the former angel's shoulder a little tighter.

Aziraphale responded by getting to his feet, knocking Crowley's hand free. "Tea?" he asked.

"Uh… tea?" Crowley parroted back at him.

"To drink. Mine's gone cold, I thought maybe I'd make a pot. It's been a long time since I made tea in an actual pot. I usually just throw a bag in the cup now. Or worse, miracle it into being fully formed; milk and all." He breezed past Crowley and into the back where he kept his small but well-stocked kitchen. "I'll put the kettle on," he said, and disappeared through the door.

Crowley remained where he was, staring at the closed door in bafflement. He picked up the book that Aziraphale had used to disguise his choice of reading material, and found the book underneath; one of his many bibles. Crowley didn't recognise it specifically, and couldn't say whether it was one of the ones with the humorous misprints, or the one to which Aziraphale had somehow added his own verses, but then he had never paid them much mind.

Technically, there was no reason that a demon couldn't read a holy book. It wasn't like holy water, or consecrated ground. It was only words, and as the rhyme said, words couldn't hurt you. Although the one time he had touched the pages of one, he was sure his fingers had tingled slightly. He had never been able to decide whether it was his imagination.

He sat down on the chair where Aziraphale had been sitting, and waited. He didn't want tea. He doubted Aziraphale really wanted tea — did anyoneever really want tea, or was it just something the English did when they needed to fill an awkward silence? — but if the angel wanted to make it, he was going to drink it.

The loud sound of something shattering in the kitchen broke the silence in the shop. Crowley was on his feet and through the door in seconds. He found Aziraphale standing very still and rigid in the centre of the kitchen, surrounded by broken shards of china. In his hand, he was holding the still complete handle of the old teapot. The electric kettle began to boil, and Aziraphale started to cry.

"Hey, don't…" Crowley began, but stopped. It was a stupid thing to say. Fragments of teapot crunched under his feet as he crossed the floor and liberated the one unbroken part of it from Aziraphale's hand. Their fingers touched as he did, and the day before he would have allowed the touch to linger. He would have made eye contact with the angel as he did, and watch to see if he blushed. Not today. Today, he took it quickly, then wrapped his arms tightly around Aziraphale.

Aziraphale stiffened in surprise, but quickly relaxed into the embrace and allow Crowley to hold him for as long as it took for the sobbing to subside. Finally, when he was done, the angel produced an honest-to-badness silk handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes.

"It was an antique," Aziraphale said finally. "It just came off of the handle and fell." His voice still shook under the exertion of holding back more tears.

Crowley cursed the damn teapot for choosing this day of all days to give up the ghost. Not that the teapot was really the problem.

"It fell," Aziraphale repeated in a whisper. The word had new significance for him now.

Crowley performed a quick and easy miracle, then showed the teapot to the angel. "There, good as new," he said. If only it was that easy with everything. "I'll make the tea," he told him. "You go… find some biscuits or something."

Aziraphale nodded. He opened a cupboard, retrieved a large metal tin and, still dabbing at his eyes, disappeared back into the shop.

Crowley stared at the teapot in his hands, only now realising he wasn't actually sure how to make tea without miracling it into existence. He flicked the kettle back on, put the teapot down carefully on the kitchen side, then began opening cupboards at random.

* * *

Comments feed the writer.


	5. Chapter 5

"Earl Grey?" Aziraphale asked as he sipped his drink. "Interesting choice. I'd have gone with English Breakfast at this time in the morning."

The skin around the angel's eyes was red and puffy, and still a little damp, but he had stopped crying, and not in that 'ready to start again at any moment' way. Crowley shrugged. "Like I know the different breeds of tea."

Aziraphale gave him a smile. Or an almost-smile. "It's not a complaint. It's fine. Good, actually." He took another sip. Crowley had served the tea in a different cup, the angel wing mug relegated to the kitchen.

Aziraphale reached for the biscuit tin that lay, already open, on the table next to him, picked something covered with chocolate, dunked it, then pulled it out of the warm drink and sucked the softened chocolate from the outside.

Crowley felt himself relax a little. This felt almost normal. It wasn't, but it felt as though it almost could be.

A rattling sound at the door indicated that it was late enough in the day for the shop to be open. Or that it might be open. It didn't exactly have regular hours.

"Closed, I'm afraid," Aziraphale called automatically, without thinking. "Try again later."

'Later' probably wasn't going to be later today. Or even later this week. Vaguely, Crowley wondered whether he should suggest putting a sign on the door. The last thing they needed right now was constant interruptions by people with nothing better to do than browse shelves full of books that Aziraphale wasn't going to let them buy.

But then he looked at the angel sipping his tea and eating his chocolate biscuit, and thought of the friendly way that, without thinking,he had called to the customer at the door, and wondered whether actually that might be exactly what Aziraphale needed. Some sense of normality.

Aziraphale quickly wiped at the last of the tears with the back of his hand, and sighed.

"Better?" Crowley asked, then hoped that it didn't sound sarcastic. It wasn't supposed to be, he really wanted to know. He braced himself for the reply.

Aziraphale sipped his tea and appeared to give the question real thought. "It's strange," he said. "I've never actually done that before. There are thousands of references in literature to crying being a cathartic experience, but I didn't expect it to actually be true."

Crowley stared. "You've never…" In over six thousand years on Earth, the angel had never cried? After everything he had seen? Everything that had happened? Or perhaps he had just never cried like that. Long and hard, with sobs wracking his body as he fought for breath, holding on tightly to Crowley as though he thought that he might fall again and he didn't want to do it alone.

From the outside it hadn't looked like it could in any way be considered a positive experience.

"Glad it helped," he said.

The angel closed his eyes and tightened his fingers around his cup. "Not much," he said. "But a little. I don't think I'm going to like this very much."

Crowley reached over and touched Aziraphale's hand as it curled around the teacup. "Hey," he said. "It's not all bad, you know."

The angel nodded, but appeared unconvinced. He still hadn't opened his eyes. "I feel empty," he said quietly. "It doesn't hurt much anymore, but it feels like something's… missing."

"Yeah, I know," Crowley told him. He didn't elaborate. Aziraphale would either work it out, or he wouldn't, and Crowley wasn't going to make matters worse by telling him. He tried to think of something he could say to change the subject, but came up blank.

Aziraphale's face took on a searching expression as he looked within himself, looking for whatever it was that was different. Crowley watched him anxiously. "Don't worry about it right now," he said. "Just drink your tea before it goes cold."

But it was too late. Aziraphale's eyes opened suddenly and Crowley found himself staring into their deep black surface. They weren't pure black, he could see that now. There were differences within the eye that allowed him to see the slightly lighter iris and the slightly darker pupil. Maybe they would vary, depending on Aziraphale's mood. His own did. Maybe once he was calm, the dark colour would drain from the whites of his eyes and he would be able to look more like himself.

But maybe not.

"The Almighty," Aziraphale said. "I can't feel the Almighty's love. It's just… gone."

Crowley slumped a little. He genuinely hadn't expected him to work it out so quickly. "Demons aren't worthy of it," he explained.

Aziraphale stilled, absorbing that. Then, slowly, he shook his head. "No, that can't be right," he said. "The Almighty loves all beings, I'm quite certain of that. She loves you, Crowley; how could She not?"

Crowley didn't answer, because he was sure that Aziraphale was wrong, but to say that would be to say that God no longer loved Aziraphale either. He didn't think he could do that to him.

"No," Aziraphale said again. "It must be something in the physiology of demons that just means they can't feel it. Like…" he floundered a little. "Like spectrums of light. I can't see as many colours anymore but I know they're still there, I just can't perceive them. It's the same thing."

"Sure," Crowley said. After all, it wasn't like he could prove him wrong. If it helped, why not let the angel have his delusion? And who knew, maybe he was even right.

"It's just one more thing I'll need to get used to, I suppose," Aziraphale said.

Crowley nodded dumbly. There was no getting used to that part. Falling was a punishment, one of the harshest Heaven had in their arsenal. One they supposedly reserved for the worst of the worst, and Aziraphale hadn't deserved it any more than Crowley had. You didn't get used to it, you either learned to revel in it like some of the others had, or you tried not to think about it and just got on with your life, like Crowley.

Aziraphale shivered as though there was a sudden chill. He took another sip of his tea, then put it down and pushed it away. "Thank you," he said.

Crowley frowned, unsure what he had done to earn thanks. "You're welcome," he said. "Next time I'll try to make the right one. Where do you keep it again?"

"Not for the tea," Aziraphale told him. "For…" he hesitated. "For everything I suppose. For staying. For helping me. You got me out of Hell. I couldn't have done that myself."

He was right, he really couldn't have. But considering Crowley was 99% sure that the main reason Aziraphale had fallen in the first place had to do with his association with a certain demon, Crowley had probably owed him.

"What would have happened?" Aziraphale asked. "If I'd stayed there?"

Crowley frowned. "What, in Hell?"

Aziraphale nodded.

"It'd mean, they'd have known about you, for a start," he said. He didn't think the demons knew what had happened yet. They would find out eventually; he wasn't naive enough to believe they would be able to hide it from them forever, but hopefully it wouldn't be for a long time.

Other than that, it was difficult to say for certain what would have happened. It wasn't like there was some set process in place for fallen angels that Crowley had interrupted by being there with him. Or at least he didn't think there was. It had been millennia since an angel had fallen, and the last time it had happened, it had been en masse. Hell had been a mess of pain and confusion then, even more so than it was now. And when it had finally dawned on them what had happened, confusion had turned to anger, frustration, and hate.

It wasn't a nice place now, but it had been even worse then.

He shrugged. "You'd have lain on the ground for a while, in pain," he said. "Eventually, it would've subsided, like it has here, and you'd just have felt…"

"Empty."

Crowley nodded. "You'd probably have got up eventually, wandered around down there looking for a way out. Would you have even have known where you were? I dunno. Maybe you'd have figured it out and kept quiet, maybe you'd just have blundered around calling out for someone to help you. Anyway, you wouldn't have found an exit because you wouldn't have known how, and eventually they'd have found you, and they'd have claimed you."

Aziraphale folded his arms tightly, almost as though he was hugging himself, trying to comfort himself. "They?" he asked.

"Demons. Beelzebub or their… minions. They'd have claimed you as one of their own, and you wouldn't have had any choice."

He thought he saw a glimmer of hope in Aziraphale's eyes at that, but he didn't understand why until he spoke. "So, if they didn't claim me, does that mean… am I not a demon yet?"

Oh. Crowley cursed softly, under his breath. That hadn't been what he had meant. He looked away. "You are."

"Then claiming means what, exactly?"

Crowley shook his head, frustrated. "I don't know. It doesn't mean anything. I mean they'd like, plug you into the hierarchy of Hell somewhere, put you to work. Maybe a bit of light torture first to try to convince you. I'm just… guessing here, angel. All I'm saying is that maybe they don't know about you. It's not like we have some kind of a demon database that pings whenever a new one pops up. I don't think anybody was expecting this."

"Least of all me."

Yeah. That made two of them. Crowley ignored the comment. "Look, the point is, we got out, and I don't think they know about you. So if we lie low, they might leave you alone. Because believe me, the last thing you want right now, or ever, is the forces of Hell taking an interest in you."

"But what about Heaven? Surely they know. They're the ones who…" Aziraphale paused, took a breath. "They cast me out. The last time we saw them, they were cooperating with Hell. Someone will have passed on the message."

Crowley thought about it. It was possible, but honestly, he doubted it. They might have been working together when the aim was to kill both of them, but this was different. "Would you go running to tell your mortal enemy you'd foisted some troublemaker off on them?"

Aziraphale raised an eyebrow above those deep black eyes. "Foisted?" he said. "Troublemaker?"

"Well, yeah. What would you call it?"

"I don't know."

"They won't tell. Demons aren't exactly known for their ability to cooperate, even with each other. I bet any truce they had, ended the moment we walked out of there and back to Earth. Anyway, think about it. If you were Gabriel, or whoever it is makes those kinds of choices, would you run off to Hell and give them a heads-up?" He paused for breath, then continued in what he thought was an accurate mimicry of Gabriel's voice. "Hey Beelzebub, remember Az… uh… that angel that helped Crowley stop our glorious war of blah blah blah? Well, we gave him the boot; he's your problem now. Toodles."

He got up and mimed walking away, waving over his shoulder as he went. At the resounding silence from the other side of the room, he turned to see Aziraphale watching him, arms still folded tightly, as though he could feel a chill. The angel shook his head. "Actually, that sounds exactly like something Gabriel would do," he said.

Maybe it did. Crowley didn't know him that well. "Yeah, maybe. But he hasn't, or we'd have visitors."

"I keep thinking that maybe I should speak to them," Aziraphale said.

Crowley stared. "What? To Beelzebub? Not a good idea."

"No, to Gabriel and Michael and the others. I mean, maybe if I could explain myself, apologise to them, maybe they'd… I don't know. Forgive me. They are angels after all."

Crowley stared. "I hope you're joking. You want to go to a place where they hate you, and where they have holy water everywhere, and say 'hi'? They tried to kill you last month, you don't think they'd do it again?"

Aziraphale nodded slowly. "Holy water," he repeated. "I didn't think of…" He took a sharp breath in, as though the full weight of what had happened to him had just hit him anew. He sat very still, fingers tight on his teacup.

"You can't fall upwards," Crowley told him, as gently as he could. "It's a one-way trip."

"I suppose you're right." Aziraphale said, "I'm beginning to think I should have gone with you to Alpha Centauri."

He didn't mean that. Even Crowley had known that it wouldn't work, even if in a brief moment of panic he had actually been completely prepared to try it.

"Crowley?" Aziraphale asked.

"Yeah?"

"Will it start to feel better soon?"

Crowley felt something inside him twist at that, and he needed to sit down. He remained where he was. "I… don't know," he said.

"Liar."

And he was. He had never lied to Aziraphale before, and he had thought that he never would. But he had never imagined this. "Like you said once, I'm a demon. It's what we do."

That had been a low blow, and he instantly regretted it. Aziraphale didn't respond.

Crowley took a few steps closer. "It's not, though," he added. "I've never lied to you. Well, okay, but not often."

"Then, will it?" Aziraphale asked again. He looked up and his black eyes reflected the lights in the room so that it almost looked as though they were filled with stars.

Crowley took another few steps closer. He lifted a hand to touch the ange… the other demon, but held back. "No. It won't. Not soon. The pain fades, and it'll keep fading. The thing is, once it's gone, that's when the other thing starts to feel so much worse. It'll never go away, not completely. But it won't always be like this."

Aziraphale nodded. "Thank you," he said, then got up and walked out of the room, leaving his tea cooling on the table, a half-eaten biscuit next to it on a saucer.


	6. Chapter 6

"You're pathetic!" Crowley snarled to the terrified houseplants as he marched up and down like a drill sergeant doing an inspection of a particularly unruly group of recruits. "Two days! Just two days without water and look what happened to you! You're spoiled! Look at the plants outside; sometimes they go weeks without water in the summer, and do you see them all wilting and drooping? I should put the lot of you in the chipper and replace you with cacti, at least they're hardy enough to last a few days in a warm room."

The plants quivered in fear as Crowley leaned in closer, running his fingers over the leaves, squeezing them, feeling the rubbery quality brought on by the dehydration. He had topped up their pots of soil with enough water to last a few more days, and was liberally spritzing the leaves with his plant mister as he ranted.

"You're lucky I've got more important things to worry about, or you'd all be out on the street. Every last one of you. And we'd see how you'd do then. Now I suppose you're going to say you've got too much water, right?" He gave one final spritz of the plant mister and slammed it down hard on the table. "Right, I'll be back soon, and I'll expect better from you. Stand up straight! Pathetic!"

With that final insult, he gave the plants one last glare and marched out of the room.

This had taken longer than he had planned. It was only supposed to be a quick trip home he hadn't been intending to waste time screaming at his plants, but they had given him no choice. All he had wanted to do was get in, give them a bit of water, pick up a few things he needed, and get back to the shop. Aziraphale had seemed more or less okay when he had left, but Crowley didn't want to leave him alone for too long.

"Pathetic," he said again, loudly enough for the plants to hear him from the other room.

Sometimes, he wondered whether the plants could actually hear him, or whether they simply picked up on the energy he was giving off. Plants didn't, as far as he was aware, have ears, but they still very definitely seemed to respond to the threats. Which made very little sense, now that he thought about it.

Aziraphale would probably know.

Thinking of the angel — not an angel, but Crowley couldn't bring himself to think of him as a demon — sent twin spikes of pain into his heart and his gut, and suddenly he couldn't breathe. He stood, paralysed by grief, trying, and failing, to suck in a breath. He balled his hand into a fist and slammed it down like a hammer into the centre of the large desk that he kept in his office. Frustration mingled with anger and helplessness inside him, and he wanted to scream. But he couldn't, because he couldn't breathe.

It felt like drowning.

But it wasn't. He couldn't drown, because he didn't need to breathe. He reminded himself of that as he doubled over, lungs screaming out for oxygen. But, he realised, he was breathing. He was breathing too much, to fast, and it still didn't feel like enough. No matter how much air he sucked into his lungs, they greedily cried out for more.

The room was spinning and he knew that he needed to stop. He stilled his breath completely, ignoring his lungs as they screamed for oxygen that they didn't need, then he exhaled, emptying them. That done, he drew in the deepest breath that he could manage, and released it as a scream so long and so loud that if he hadn't completely soundproofed the flat, he was sure somebody would have called the police.

It didn't help.

He tried again, screaming words this time; obscenities directed at nobody in particular. At the universe in general; at Heaven and Hell.

At God.

"Fuck you! You hear me? Fuck you!"

As always when he screamed at the heavens, he received no reply. Or maybe that was the reply. Silent indifference from a God that no longer cared about him; that had cast him out; discarded him like he was nothing.

He sat down heavily in the large, throne-like chair and slouched as hard as he could, staring heaven-ward, pleading. If she had ever heard him, if she was ever going to hear him again, he needed it to be now.

Nothing.

The empty place inside of him ached so much more than it ever had before, he felt her loss more keenly than he had in millennia. The pain of it expanded to fill his whole being, and it felt so lonely that he could barely stand it. He didn't want this for Aziraphale.

It wasn't fair.

"He never did anything wrong," Crowley begged. "Not one thing… well okay he's done the odd temptation for me, but I made up for that, we evened things out." And of course there was all the other things. The angel was anything but innocent, but everything he had ever done was fuelled, at heart, by love, and surely that counted for something.

Anyway, none of that had caused his fall, or this would have happened centuries ago.

"His whole existence all he's ever done was try to make things better. He's made me better. And I know there's no such thing as redemption, I knowyou can't undo it once it's done, but… can you? Just this one time? For him? He's so good, and Satan knows why, but he still loves you."

As he had expected, there was no response. It had been eons since he had heard her voice. He didn't even remember what it sounded like anymore.

Crowley leaned forward, elbows on the desk, all the energy drained from him. The silence that answered him was made worse by not knowing whether she heard his prayer and chose to ignore it, or whether he was screaming into the abyss.

"They never even gave him a reason. There was no warning, no… anything. At least I know what I did wrong. I mean, I only asked questions, but fine. Not allowed. Stupid rule, but I knew it and I broke it, What did he do? He never once questioned you, he never lost faith in you, he trusted you right up until the moment you cast him out. He just trusted the plan. The 'ineffable' plan. Well, you know what? Screw the ineffable plan.

"Why don't you punish me instead? Tell Hell how I survived the holy water, have them try again. Send me down there and let them torture me for all eternity, just forgive him; take him back. Please."

God, as always, said nothing at all. Crowley rested his head on the table, turning it slowly from side to side. "I hate you for this. You know that, right? Never did before. I always figured he was right; you had a plan, and if that involved me being a demon, fine, whatever. But now I hate you. And do you know what? He'll hate you too one day."

Crowley closed his eyes.

"He's not supposed to be able to hate."

But then, a demon wasn't supposed to be able to love either, and Crowley did.

The silence felt louder than ever before; more oppressive. As though it was pushing in on him from all angles, crushing him under its weight.

"Fine," he continued. "If you can't fix it…" Of course God could fix it, she was the Almighty for Satan's sake. She had written the rules in the first place, so if anybody could bend them it was her. "If you won't fix it; if you won't take him back, can you just give him something? Anything. Just make it easier on him than it was on me, because he doesn't deserve this. He doesn't."

Silence. He wanted to scream again.

He didn't. Instead he dragged his head up from the desk, forced protesting limbs to pull him up from the chair and headed to the door. "Fine. Don't help," he said. "See if I care. We don't need you anyway."


	7. Chapter 7

Crowley glared across the room at the ridiculous stretched sofa-chair thing he had created. He had expected it to disappear the moment Aziraphale set eyes on it. He hadn't accounted for the fact that the former angel might actually like it.

He wouldn't have done before. Crowley was certain of that.

Aziraphale was actually sitting on the thing, one foot on the ground, the other leg bent and resting on the chair. He had moved, or possibly miracled into being, two cushions, that he had rested against the wooden arm of the former armchair to make it more comfortable, and was lounging against them in a very un-Aziraphale way.

A book rested on his knees, and he was wearing those pointless reading glasses on his nose as though he actually believed he needed them. Crowley watched him out of the corner of his eye, trying not to tip him off that he was being observed. The angel appeared completely engrossed in whatever he was reading, and the facade would have been convincing if not for the fact that it had been over ten minutes since he had turned the page.

Crowley had seen Aziraphale read. He devoured texts at a seemingly impossible pace, taking in and absorbing the information, filing it away in his mind, adding it to his encyclopaedic knowledge of literature. Often he would talk about what he was reading too, either attempting to discuss with Crowley things that the demon knew nothing about and didn't care to know, or occasionally reading fragments of text aloud when they caught his attention, muttering to himself about things he had noticed and wanted to remember.

Not today. Today he stared impassively down at the page, silent and listless. The way that he was sitting bothered Crowley too. It wasn't only that he looked as though he lacked the energy to sit up straight, but that Crowley didn't think he had ever seen the angel slouch. Not once. On anybody else it would have been unremarkable, but on Aziraphale it looked so out of place that Crowley couldn't help but stare.

He couldn't remember the last time he had seen the angel eat or drink anything, but he suspected it was the tea Crowley had made for him three days previously. It wasn't a worry, as such. Neither angels nor demons had any real need to eat, but this was Aziraphale.

Or at least, it used to be…

Crowley pushed that unwelcome thought from his mind the moment it manifested. He was still Aziraphale, even if he couldn't use that name anymore. He hadn't chosen a new one, but Crowley wasn't surprised; it wasn't a decision to be taken lightly. Still, it would have been nice to have something to call him, even if it was only on a temporary basis. The sooner Aziraphale became whoever he was going to be, the sooner Crowley could start trying to get used to it.

And the sooner Aziraphale could too.

Crowley cleared his throat. "Hey, maybe you should get a real sofa if you like having one," he suggested. "You know, one that doesn't look so… that. I mean, wasn't that chair an antique? How long had you had it? Don't you want it back how it's supposed to be?"

Aziraphale shook his head. "It's fine," he said.

"It's really not. Even I can tell it doesn't fit in here. In fact, it literally doesn't fit, that's why if you want to walk past it you have to press your back against the wall and exhale. It's not exactly practical. Or even very comfortable."

Aziraphale didn't reply.

"Doesn't it, you know, throw off your whole aesthetic?"

Although, it didn't. Not really. It actually fit in really well amongst the organised clutter of the bookshop, and under any other circumstances Crowley might have been pleased about the angel finally lightening up a bit, and providing somewhere for him to more comfortably lounge when he came over. But as it was, it reminded him of things that he would rather not think about.

The door to the shop remained locked. Other than the few times that Crowley had nipped out to water his plants, it had not opened in days. Maybe that was for the best. Maybe being forced to interact with people was the last thing Aziraphale needed. But then, maybe it would help.

"Have you thought about opening the shop?" he asked.

He was answered by silence, as he had expected. If felt uncomfortably like another one-sided conversation that Crowley had had recently.

Aziraphale turned to look at him though, and that, at least, felt like progress.

"Think about it," Crowley continued. "You're going to have to get back out into the world sooner or later, or else what was the point in saving it? And it's not like you get crowds of people in here. You'll get a few customers a day who want to talk about books. It should help ease you back into it."

No response.

"You're going to have to do it sooner or later."

He didn't, though. There was no real reason why Aziraphale needed to run a bookshop, other than it was his cover, and he didn't really need a cover. Crowley had got by for years without one. He just posed as some guy who was rich enough not to need to work. But Aziraphale loved his books, and he loved to be able to show them off, and that was the real purpose behind the shop. Not to sell them — which he did only once in a blue moon, and then only when it was one that he had deliberately decided to part with — but to enjoy them.

It was part of who he was, and it wouldn't be fair if he had to lose that too.

"Don't you wish you had something to do?" Crowley added. "Come on, I know you hate sitting around doing nothing. You always have."

"I'm not doing nothing," Aziraphale told him. "I'm reading."

"And don't you wish that when you finish reading, you could talk about the book with someone? Someone who actually gets what you're on about? You've got customers you do that with, right?"

Aziraphale closed the book with a clap and slammed it down on the seat next to him. "And what about this?" he snapped. He indicated his face with a wave of a hand, then looked away again, as though having drawn Crowley's attention to his eyes, he wanted to ensure that he couldn't see them anymore.

Crowley almost flinched at the raised voice, and the anger behind it. He had never heard that from the angel before, not like that, and not directed at him.

Of course, he wasn't really an angel anymore.

Crowley folded his arms and feigned nonchalance, as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening. "Oh, they're fine," he assured him.

Aziraphale blinked and looked at him again. "They are most definitely not."

He was right. They remained unchanged from the first time that Crowley had noticed them, as he had dragged the angel out of Hell, and they still gave him a start every time he looked at them. Unlike Crowley's, which would appear more snake-like in heightened emotional states and when he was calling on his demonic powers, Aziraphale's eyes appeared to be consistently black.

And it was going to be a problem for him, for a while, at least.

Aziraphale folded his arms and turned away again. He sank back into silence.

"Oh, don't look so down," Crowley told him, as casually as he could. "We'll get you some sunglasses, it'll be fine."

The angel appeared unconvinced. "And for certain situations that will be fine," he said. "But I have regular customers who are going to wonder why I've suddenly taken to wearing sunglasses inside."

Crowley was very careful not to show his triumph at the fact that Aziraphale was talking again. "I do it," Crowley told him. "And yeah, sometimes people look at you funny. If it happens I just… you know."

Aziraphale stared at him in horror. "You just what?"

Crowley looked at him, mock hurt in his expression. "I make them stop noticing. What did you think I was going to say? I kill them?"

"Well… something like that, yes." Aziraphale said.

That hurt. That actually hurt.

"Angel, in all the time you've known me, have you ever seen me kill anybody? What do you think, that because I'm a demon I go around murdering innocent people because they look at me sideways?"

There was a noticeable silence in the gap where Aziraphale would normally come up with some nonsense about good and evil and their relative places within that scale.

"Okay, look," Crowley said. "Do you feel evil right now? Are you battling the urge to hurt people? Go on a killing spree? No. Of course you're not. You're a demon too now, in case you've forgotten."

"I could hardly forget," Aziraphale told him.

"I don't hurt people," Crowley said. "I just give them the tools to hurt themselves. That's what you never seemed to get, angel. Demons aren't evil, we're — well okay some of them are evil — but mostly we're just people with a job to do. I'm not out there hurting people any more than you're out there blessing them left right and centre. That's not what it's about. All I do is give people options and let them make their own decisions. Maybe sow a little discontent in there too, to help things along. And yeah, I try to tempt them into making the bad choice, but ultimately it's up to them."

"Yes," Aziraphale told him, "but…"

"And you know what? You've done it too. And you were good at it. And it's all part of the plan, right? So maybe your fall wasn't just Gabriel deciding to get rid of you, maybe someone decided that in the grand scheme of things, you were going to be of more use on the other side."

Silence again, and on the one hand that wasn't ideal when Aziraphale had just started to talk again, but on the other, Crowley didn't actually want him to talk right now; he wanted him to listen. He couldn't help but feel a hint of guilt at the hurt his words were causing, but it had to be said. It was one thing — one slightly frustrating thing — Aziraphale believing demons were intrinsically evil when he was an angel, but Crowley couldn't have him thinking the same thing now. He couldn't have him thinking that about himself.

"I don't want to be…" Aziraphale began.

"Tough. Nothing you can do about it." He wished there was, he wished, but… "But as I've quite effectively proven, demons can go around doing blessings and miracles too, if they really want to. But do you want to? It's boring. In all the years I've known you, I've never once seen you do one for fun. But have I seen you do a temptation? Yes. Loads of them. And half the time I don't even think you realise you're doing it. So don't pretend like you don't enjoy it."

For a moment, he thought that Aziraphale was going to sink back into silence, and then he thought that he was going to deny it. He did neither. Instead, he changed the subject. Or rather, steered it back to where it had started. "You make them stop noticing the sunglasses?"

"Uh…Yeah, kind of." Crowley replied, momentarily thrown by the sudden change of topic. "It's more like I make them not think it's unusual. It's not difficult." He frowned thoughtfully. "I mean, you could always make them not notice at all, just fix things so they don't even see your eyes. But that's less easy, especially keeping something like that up all the time. Your concentration slips and you end up having to do damage control."

He knew this from experience. It had been millennia before humans had invented something that he could use to disguise his eyes without having to cover his entire head in a very uncomfortable helmet. It had been a huge relief to be able to slip on a pair of shades and stop having to think about it. But what for him had been liberating, he imagined for Aziraphale would feel like the opposite.

"Come on, angel. Try it. Take a chance. What's the alternative? You hide out in here for the rest of eternity?"

"You should stop calling me that," Aziraphale said.

"Calling you what?"

"Angel." Aziraphale looked away again. "I'm not anymore."

Oh. But he was. It had never been a description, but a word, a… not pet name exactly, but something like it, and he had enjoyed using it because Aziraphale had never understood that. It had been something that he could get away with. And that was why it had never seriously occurred to him to stop now. But if he couldn't call him that, and he couldn't call him by his name without hurting him, he had no idea what to call him.

"Pick another name, then," he said. It came out a little more harshly than he had intended. He was angry, but not at Aziraphale; at the situation. "I mean…" he added, "when you're ready. Nothing to say whatever you choose has to stick forever."

Aziraphale looked at him for a long moment, then shook his head and changed the subject again. "I'd be doing damage control with everybody," he said. My regulars are all going to notice if I start wearing sunglasses."

"Just tell then that whatever I've got is contagious," Crowley told him. "It's basically what happened anyway."

Aziraphale didn't respond. Crowley looked over at him, and found the angel staring at him, dark eyes wide in what looked like horror. "Crowley, this isn't… you don't think this is your fault, do you?"

It was his fault. That hadn't been exactly what Crowley had meant; it had been a joke, but the fact that Aziraphale had heard it that way showed that it was on his mind too. And why wouldn't it be? In all the years they had known each other, Aziraphale had never once asked about his fall, and if he had, Crowley would have responded with some quip about sauntering downward. The only thing he ever remembered sharing, one chilly December night over a bottle of 37 year old Lagavulin, was something about hanging around with the wrong people.

Just like Aziraphale had hung around with him. Because he had, slowly but surely, slithered his way into the angel's life, starting with that day on the wall of Eden. If he had just done the temptation and then left, Aziraphale would still be an angel.

True, they might be on opposing sides of a war between Heaven and Hell that neither one of them agreed with or wanted to fight in, but maybe not. The cock-up with the babies would still have happened, and who knew, maybe Adam wouldn't have destroyed the world after all. Crowley had to admit that his and Aziraphale's roles in the cancelling of the apocalypse hadn't been as big as they had been expecting.

"It's not your fault," Aziraphale said again.

"Well it sure as Heaven isn't yours," Crowley told him. "How do these things work, anyway? Does it just happen, like you do one too many things that Heaven doesn't like and down you go? Or is it Gabriel sitting up there in that ludicrous white room pressing a button? I bet it's that, isn't it?"

Aziraphale shook his head. "I don't know. We weren't supposed to ask."

"Well now you can. You can ask all the questions you like."

Aziraphale frowned hesitantly. "Yes. But the thing is, I never really had that many questions."

It was Gabriel, Crowley was sure of it. The whole thing stank of him. Aziraphale hadn't even been doing anything when it had happened. The Archangel had waited, biding his time until they thought the had gotten away with it, and then cut Aziraphale loose. For all he had raged at Her, he didn't truly believe God had much to do with it. The Almighty wouldn't punish someone who loved and trusted them as much as Aziraphale had.

Although, standing idly by and allowing it to happen when you had the power to stop it was worse, in Crowley's opinion.

If Gabriel ever had the misfortune to run into Crowley again, he was going to make the Archangel wish he had been the one to fall.

"You've got to wonder why, though," he mused.

Aziraphale shook his head. "I know why. They did it to hurt me. In fact, probably to hurt both of us."

Crowley slumped in his seat. That was the truest thing he had heard in days. He imagined Gabriel and the others watching, gloating. He was surprised they hadn't had a visit. But then, Gabriel probably considered it beneath him now.

Or he was afraid of what Crowley would do to him.

"Then don't let it. You don't think they'll be watching? Show them you're okay."

"Even if I'm not?"

"Especially if you're not."

Aziraphale frowned. He folded his arms and appeared to think about it.

"So, sunglasses," Crowley said. "Let's get you some." He leapt to his feet, removed his own pair and offered them to Aziraphale. "Here, wear these in the meantime."

The angel hesitated. "Oh, no. I don't think going out right now is a good idea."

"Well I do," Crowley told him.

"And I don't!" Aziraphale snapped, almost snarling in anger.

There was something vicious in him, or he was something vicious, something that Crowley instinctively wanted to get away from. He dropped his hand, offering the sunglasses, to his side and took a step backward. "Okay," he said. "Sorry."

"No," Aziraphale said, then hesitated. "No, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do that."

And just like that, he was Aziraphale again. He folded his arms and looked away, embarrassed.

"I feel angry," he said. "All the time."

Oh. Crowley sighed. "Yeah, that'll be the rage. At the injustice of it all. It won't go away, I'm afraid. Might simmer down after a couple of centuries. You'll get used to it after a while."

"I've never really been angry before."

Crowley took a slightly hesitant step forward. "Really? Not even that time I made all the pages of the book you were reading turn blank?" He had definitely seemed mad. Even though it had been easy enough to fix, he had acted as though the book had been irredeemably damaged, and he had sulked for days.

Aziraphale shook his head. "Not like this."

"You know what's probably not helping? Being cooped up in here. Think about it, do you want to spend the rest of eternity in this bookshop?" Actually, he probably did. "Don't you want to be able to go out sometimes? Start visiting those restaurants again that you love so much?"

"Well, yes. But…"

"Sushi," Crowley said. "Been a while since you had that. And that nice little Italian bakery that do those little pastry… whatever they're called things."

"Sfogliatella."

"Uh… Gesundheit. And the bread with the olives in it. Nice place. I went past it the other day and they didn't have a single customer, just the poor guy that runs it sitting behind the counter reading the paper. You're probably the only one keeping that place afloat. Only you're not, are you? Because you're here instead."

He offered the glasses again, holding out his hand and waiting until Aziraphale gave into the pressure and reluctantly took them from him. "What about you?" he asked. "Don't you need these?"

"I've got plenty of spares in the car," Crowley told him. He opened the door. "Out. Come on. Before someone notices the door's open and tries to buy a book."

Aziraphale hesitated, staring down at the sunglasses in his hand, fingers tracing the shape of them.

"I haven't got all day, angel."

Aziraphale took a deep breath, then put on the glasses and took a decisive step out of the door and into the street beyond.

* * *

Comments feed the writer.


	8. Chapter 8

Aziraphale flipped down the sun visor in the front seat of the Bentley, and looked into the mirror. Slowly, he turned his head from left to right, examining his reflection wearing the new sunglasses he had bought. He pulled the glasses down a little, until his eyes almost — but not quite — showed over the top, then pushed them back up his nose. He turned his head as far as he could to the left, and then to the right. Finally, when he was satisfied, he pushed the visor back up and stared out of the window instead.

"Happy?" Crowley asked him.

Aziraphale turned to look at him. "I suppose I'm moderately less unhappy than I was before."

Crowley nodded. He had meant happy with the sunglasses, not in general, but the answer was encouraging anyway. "I guess I'll take that," he said. He put the key in the ignition, turned it, and listened to the sound of the car starting up. For a moment, it was all that he could hear, until the CD player kicked in and the familiar sound of Queen began to fill the air.

"There's one thing I don't understand," Aziraphale said.

"Oh?"

Distractedly, the angel pulled down the mirror and checked his reflection again. He pushed the sunglasses a little higher, then shook his head quickly from side to side. They slipped a fraction of an inch down his nose, and he left them where they were. "Do you think I should have got a pair with more side coverage, like yours?" he asked.

"That's what you don't understand?" Crowley asked.

Outside, angry drivers manoeuvred around the Bentley, which was parked at the side of the road in what definitely wasn't a parking spot, in the middle of Camden High Street. They beeped their horns in anger as they passed him, leaning on them hard, so that the air was filled with a symphony of frustration. Crowley ignored them.

"No, that was something that just occurred to me now," Aziraphale explained. He turned his head to look straight forward. "Look at me from the side. Can you see anything odd?"

Crowley looked, and yes, he could. He had thought it when the angel had first picked up that particular pair, but the way that Aziraphale's face had lit up in the brightest of smiles when he had tried them on had forced Crowley to bite back his advice.

They were that little bit too small for Crowley's liking. He liked that they disguised less of the angel's face than his own shades had when he had lent them to him, but there was more possibility of the eyes beneath them being seen. The arms were thick enough though, where they connected to the frames, to provide just about enough cover.

He had figured that either it would be okay and people simply wouldn't notice the eyes beneath them, or it wouldn't, and Aziraphale would either realise that and get a new pair, or he would learn to deflect people's gazes, as Crowley had done for thousands of years. It wasn't that difficult really. The hard part was remembering to keep doing it.

"Well?" Aziraphale asked impatiently. He leaned in a little closer, still facing front.

Crowley sighed. "The arms are thick enough to mostly hide it," he said. "It's pretty dark behind the glasses anyway. So yeah, I can see your eyes, but I know what to look for. I think most people are going to assume it's a trick of the light."

"But not all of them." Aziraphale began to fidget nervously with one of the buttons of his waistcoat, careful not to touch the fabric with his nails.

"Yeah, probably not, but it's the best you can hope for, really. Anyway, like I said, make them not notice. It's not so difficult when you get into the habit."

The glasses Aziraphale had chosen had a blue tint to them, but were dark enough that it was almost impossible to see the eyes behind them. They had a slightly 1960s feel to them that Crowley appreciated; he had enjoyed the 60s immensely, for the most part. Aziraphale hadn't said so, but from the angel's reaction to putting them on, Crowley wondered whether the blue tint altered the way the world looked just enough to make the changes to his vision either less noticeable, or more tolerable.

Aziraphale nodded. He folded his arms and leaned back against the backrest of the seat and sighed deeply. "Anyway, what I was going to say was, I don't understand is why I look different at all. This body was issued to me in Heaven, and it looked a certain way. It certainly didn't have these." He raised his hands to display his nails.

That was a fair question. Crowley stared into the rearview mirror and grinned sarcastically as a driver trying to get past him gave him the finger.

"You think Hell deliberately issues bodies that stand out on Earth? That look like they do? You think Hastur was choosing how he wanted to appear up here and was like 'That's the one. It looks like its rotting from the inside out, that's exactly how I want the people of Earth to…" he stopped, realising that was actually probably exactly what Hastur would think.

"No, I suppose not," Aziraphale said. "So…"

"So they look standard human when they made then, then when a demon gets inside one, the demonic aspects kinda… leak through."

"So I've… contaminated it."

Crowley turned to stare at him. "Wha…? No! Don't say it like that!"

Aziraphale looked straight ahead. Through the gap in the side of the sunglasses, Crowley saw him blink rapidly, several times."

"You know, you fell inside a body," Crowley told him. "That's never happened before. We didn't have them the first time round. Didn't need them; humans hadn't really been invented yet."

"No," Aziraphale said. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, sat up straight, and placed his hands in his lap. "No I suppose not."

"Honestly, I didn't know whether it was going to survive the process. I thought it might, like, burn up or something."

He noticed that Aziraphale had turned to look at him again. It was strange not to see his eyes, but he imagined them big and round, watching as he listened. Crowley took a deep breath. Without a body, the angel would have needed to cope not only with the sudden loss of his angelic status and everything that came with it, but with a vastly different, possibly very inhuman, form.

That wasn't any fun, Crowley knew from experience.

He turned off the engine, silencing Freddie Mercury just as he started to sing about fat bottomed girls. This was the kind of conversation that didn't need that in the background. Actually, it was the kind of conversation best held over a quality bottle of scotch, preferably several drinks in.

"Your true form will be different now," he said. "And what you see in this body will be influenced by that. Like my eyes, and this." He turned his head and pointed to the snake shaped mark on the side of his face. "But it's not a 'contamination', it's just… how it is."

Aziraphale touched his own face in the same location.

"You might have one too, somewhere," Crowley told him. "Not a snake, but something."

The angel… former angel… nodded slowly. "Where?" he asked

Crowley shrugged. "I don't know. It's not on your face though, so there's that at least."  
Outside, the sun appeared from behind a cloud and Crowley realised that if it was bright enough, and he looked hard enough, he could just about make out the shape of the angel's eyes behind the blue-tinted lenses. "Oh, Crowley," he said. "Yours looks perfectly fine. I've always admired it, actually."

Crowley grinned. "Oh, I know it does," he assured him. "I happen to like it there." He did, too. He always had, but it fit his current image particularly nicely. "I doubt you'd have felt the same, though."

Aziraphale nodded. "Perhaps not." He shook his head. "I didn't think about any of this," he said. He adjusted the glasses on his face again. "My true form… What do you think I look like?"

"It doesn't matter," Crowley told him.

"Of course it matters," Aziraphale told him. It could be… It could be anything. What if it's…"

"Really, angel," Crowley told him. "It doesn't matter. Your true form isn't important. Seriously, when's the last time you even used it?"

Aziraphale considered it then shrugged.

"I bet it's millennia. I bet nobody even uses them in Heaven anymore. Didn't see any while I was up there pretending to be you. And the way you talk about the paperwork up there, it sounds worse than my… our… lot, I bet it's hard to do paperwork when you're shaped like that!"

"I suppose it would be, yes."

An angel's true form looked like nothing human, and nothing that could be truly comprehended by human eyes; it had a tendency to break them and leave them a babbling mess on the floor, screaming about monsters with too many eyes. It was the kind of thing that, while it hadn't been designed to inspire awe and madness when they saw it, had a tendency to do just that anyway.

"If you ask me, an angel's true form is way more frightening than a demon's could ever be."

Aziraphale nodded.

"So, when was the last time you used it?"

"About six thousand years ago. Briefly."

"Exactly. You've been person-shaped since people were invented, And we're planning on staying right here on Earth, so who needs a true form?"

"You use yours a lot," Aziraphale told him. "Only last week I found you being a snake napping in a patch of sunlight behind a bookshelf."

Crowley smiled. It had been so warm there, he hadn't been able to resist. "Noticed that, did you?"

"Not me, actually. One of my customers. It took a miracle to stop her from calling the RSPCA. And another one to keep her from writing about it on Yelp."

Crowley couldn't help it; he threw back his head and laughed out loud. There was something so ridiculous about the fact that Aziraphale even knew what Yelp was, let alone worried about what people might write on it. But at the same time the fact that he did, and that it was still on his mind now, gave Crowley hope that the bookshop would re-open, and that normality — or some version of it — would be restored.

He stole a glance, and found Aziraphale smiling too. A genuine smile that shone through even behind the dark glasses disguising his eyes. Crowley reached down the side of his seat, next to the door, where he had stashed a paper bag containing a packet of cheap nail files, and two bottles of nail varnish in pale pink and white. He had snuck away and picked them up while Aziraphale had been browsing every pair of sunglasses for sale in the whole of Camden.

He shoved it at the angel. "Here, I got you this. Don't say I never give you anything."

Aziraphale frowned as he accepted the bag. "I would never say that," he said.

Crowley rolled his eyes and started the engine again as Aziraphale peered into the bag and gasped in surprise. "Crowley, thank you!" he exclaimed.

Crowley shook his head. As far as he was concerned, they'd been on the same side for years, and now it was official, but he still couldn't help but feel a little nervous when he heard Aziraphale thank him. Of course if anyone was listening, they were already in enough trouble. Crowley doubted Hell would be happy with him for concealing a new demon from them. That was probably worse than doing a minor favour for the other side.

"Yeah, whatever," he said, and pulled out into the traffic.

He glanced back at Aziraphale just in time to see his face fall. "But, do you think it'll work?"

"Only one way to find out," he said.

Crowley realised the moment the words were out of his mouth what a mistake it had been. He deliberately hit the accelerator as he hit a sharp corner, and swerved to avoid a couple of tourists in the middle of the road. Aziraphale gripped the bag hard and inhaled sharply. "Crowley please! If I'm discorporated now, I have no idea what's would happen to me. And I doubt Hell would just hand you a new body either."

He was right there. But they weren't going to be discorporated, at least, not as a result of his driving. Crowley expertly manoeuvred the Bentley around taxis picking up and dropping off their fares, busses meandering unhurried down the road, and around cyclists and pedestrians. Nobody paid him any mind. He liked to boast that it was his expert driving skills that allowed him to do what nobody else in the city could, but in reality he was helped a great deal by a series of demonic miracles that he performed almost without thinking about them.

Apparently, all the swerves, sudden hits on the brake, and near misses he could make weren't going to prevent Aziraphale from opening his present. He practically dove into the bag, retrieved the packet of nail files, and sliced the plastic wrapper open with the nail of his index finger. He noticed Crowley watching and gave him an embarrassed smile and a shrug. "If it doesn't work, that's a skill that'll come in handy at least," he said.

He wasn't wrong, actually.

It was a very large packet of nail files; Crowley had figured that it might take more than one or two to blunt the weapons that had formed on the ends of the angel's fingers. Aziraphale removed one of the files carefully and began to file the end of a nail, pouring all of his concentration into the act of blunting the sharp tip into something that wasn't going to accidentally damage anything. Or anybody.

Crowley tried, and failed, not to watch a thin coating of off-white powder floating through the air and settling on Aziraphale's lap, the car door, and probably everywhere else too. He gritted his teeth.

"Just so you know," he said. "Filing your nails in my car doesn't get to become a regular thing. The only reason you're allowed to do it now is I'm more concerned about you accidentally cutting the upholstery with them than I am about you getting nail-dust everywhere."

The Queen track on the car stereo finished and the opening of Bohemian Rhapsody began to fill the air. Crowley subtly thumbed the button to move it to the next track. Aziraphale genuinely seemed to be doing better, but he probably didn't need Beelzebub to feature in the soundtrack to this particular shopping trip.

Crowley sighed and tried not to think about the nail fragments coating the interior of his car. All things considered, the trip out had been a success. Getting Aziraphale out into the world had been a good thing. It had been a risk; it could have gone badly wrong. If anybody had noticed anything unusual, and if Aziraphale had noticed them noticing, it might have set him back before he had even begun to step forward.

But that hadn't happened, and now the angel looked almost content as he vigorously attacked the sharp edge of his nail with an already almost bare nail file. Getting out was good. The fresh air probably helped a little, not that you could ever really describe the air in London as 'fresh', but at least it was air that hadn't been marinated in old books and dust for over three centuries.

More than that though, it was the people. Crowley had watched as Aziraphale, eyes disguised and hands mostly clasped behind his back out of view or in constant motion in an attempt to disguise his nails, had chatted with market traders, haggled over the price of his new sunglasses, and sampled the sweets on sale at a market stall. And he could, apparently, still talk Crowley into doing things for him, even without the puppy dog eyes, as evidenced by the baklava dripping honey into a plastic tray in a bag on the back seat.

Aziraphale was, at heart, a people person, in the same way that Crowley was not. It was what had drawn him into the centre of London in the first place, and to Rome, and to all the other population centres where Crowley had encountered him over the centuries. He thrived on contact with others, be it befriending the proprietor of every independent restaurant within a two mile radius of his shop, discussing 17th century literature with his regular customers, or sharing a bottle of something with Crowley.

And, of course, his constantly open connection to Heaven.

Losing that connection hurt. It was an ache that never truly healed, and Crowley suspected that Aziraphale was going to feel it much more acutely than he ever had. With it severed, the angel would need other forms of connection all the more. Which meant no more hiding away in the bookshop.

Or less, anyway.

"Crowley, are you okay?" Aziraphale asked.

Crowley blinked, and turned to look at him questioningly. "What?"

"Keep your eyes on the road!"

Crowley briefly turned back to check the road ahead of him, then directed most of his attention at the passenger seat again. "It's fine, I've got two of them, I can do both. Did you just ask if I'm okay?"

Aziraphale continued filing his nails. He had moved on to a new nail file, but was still working on the same nail, drawing the file back and forth repeatedly, yet seeming to be making any progress. He must be though, if the nail wasn't filing down, it wouldn't be creating so much dust.

"Yes," Aziraphale told him. "You've dropped down to 60 miles an hour, that's not like you."

"Just thinking," Crowley told him.

"About what?"

He shook his head, "Nothing important." Nothing he wanted to share right now, anyway. But Aziraphale was still looking at him, waiting for him to elaborate. He sighed and said the first thing that came into his head. "I guess in a way, it's a good thing this happened while it was still more or less summer. Your sunglasses choices would have been much more limited if it was January."

"I could have got some online," Aziraphale told him, prompting Crowley's jaw to drop open.

"You shop online?"

Aziraphale smiled. "I deal in rare books, dear. Where do you think is the best place to acquire difficult to find merchandise?" He threw another used nail file back into the bag, carefully touched the tip of the nail with a finger to test it, and smiled. "It's working," he said.

Crowley grinned as Aziraphale got out a third file and continued to work on the same nail. With careful application of the two shades of nail varnish, they would hopefully be able to paint away the discolouration. Crowley didn't like to brag — actually, yes he did — but he was pretty good at nail varnish.

And if they couldn't, well, it wasn't the end of the world. It just felt worse because the angel had always taken such care with his nails.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

Aziraphale turned to look at him. From the front, the glasses were almost completely opaque and it was nearly impossible to see even the outline of his eyes through them, nobody was going to notice the colour. "I'm sorry, what?" Aziraphale asked.

"I asked if you were okay," Crowley told him.

Aziraphale frowned thoughtfully, then turned up the music until it would be impossible to hold a conversation over the sound of Another One Bites The Dust blasting from the stereo.

* * *

_Comments are loved_


	9. Chapter 9

Sorry it took so long to get this finished. The ending was being very stubborn. But here it is, finally. I hope you enjoy! Thanks for reading, and for all the comments everyone had left along the way, I've appreciated every one of them so much.

During the process of writing this, I've generated a few 'deleted scenes' that I wrote and unfortunately either couldn't get into the story, or had to take out. I'm going to be posing them on my Tumblr (I use the same username as here) at some point, but I may also put them in an extra chapter on here, so look out for that, if it's something you'd be interested in.

* * *

Crowley carried the white plastic bag carefully in one hand, trying not to allow it to swing too much and disturb the contents. In his other hand, he cradled a bottle of saké. The restaurant he had visited didn't actually do takeaway, and the waiter had appeared very surprised to find a stash of plastic containers and carrier bags in the kitchen when he had gone to look, but Crowley had assumed they would be there. After all, what kind of a restaurant doesn't run a takeaway service?

Well other than, now he thought of it, the vast majority of the restaurants that Aziraphale liked to frequent.

He glanced down at the bag in his hand and shrugged. If reality wanted to rearrange itself to suit his whims, who was he to complain about it? And the chef had been very accommodating when he had explained the situation.

He transferred the bottle of saké to the hand holding the bag, stuck a key in the lock of Aziraphale's shop, and turned it.

To his surprise, it didn't turn. He tried again, and then a third time before realising that it was difficult to unlock a door that wasn't locked. A hum of worry began to play in the back of his mind, as it always did when he found anything out of the ordinary at the shop; as it always had since he had arrived to find the place on fire and Aziraphale gone.

Relief washed over him when he pushed open the door to find the angel sitting at his usual desk, some kind of paperwork — the earthly kind, not the other — on the surface in front of him. His eyes were still covered by the blue tinted sunglasses. It was almost completely dark in the room, the only illumination spilling in from the streetlights outside.

"Angel, what are you doing?" Crowley asked him. "You opened the shop? It's the middle of the night."

Aziraphale looked up. He was bathed in yellowish light from the old fashioned streetlights outside. They had not yet been upgraded to the new, harsher white, energy-saving kind that had begin to spring up around the city. In fact, Crowley was almost certain that the street containing the bookshop was the only street in the area that had not yet been upgraded. He assumed Aziraphale was in some way responsible.

"It's evening," the angel corrected. "And it was only for a couple of hours." He began to stack up whatever he had been working on into neat piles. "No customers though."

No customers was just the way Aziraphale liked it. Crowley checked his watch. 'Evening' was pushing it a bit at quarter past ten; the shop had been open for a couple of hours when there had been almost no possibility of anybody walking through the door. Even with its eclectic opening hours, unless Aziraphale forgot to lock the door, it was rare for the shop to be open beyond five or six. Nobody would have tried to go inside because nobody would have expected to be able to.

And then there was the fact that there were no lights on inside. It didn't exactly scream 'open for business'. Crowley flicked on the light switch. "Little tip," he said. "Not that I want to tell you how to run your business or anything, but humans can't see in the dark."

Aziraphale looked up at the light, and then at Crowley. Beyond the sunglasses, Crowley could make out a bewildered expression. "I didn't know Icould."

Oh. Right. Crowley shrugged as casually as he could manage. "Perks," he said, then held the takeaway bag and the bottle aloft. "Now, I'd say the grand re-opening deserves a celebration. Wouldn't you?"

"Oh, it was hardly very grand." Aziraphale looked at the bag, and Crowley felt a twinge of regret that behind the sunglasses he couldn't make out the expression that he was imagining on Aziraphale's face. In his mind, it was dismissive of the words he had said, but morphed into curiosity as his eyes focussed on the plastic bag. "What is that?" he asked.

Crowley reached up and removed his own shades. It was something he had never, or rarely, bothered to do in the past, but some part of him hoped that if he did, he could get the angel to reciprocate. It wasn't going exactly to plan. Since they had bought the sunglasses, he had seen the angel's eyes only twice; the time that he had walked in on him staring despondently into a mirror, and the day before, when he had returned to the shop to find him cleaning the glasses with the cleaning cloth and spray he used to use on the reading glasses that he had now relegated to a drawer in his desk. Both times, he had hurriedly put them back on the instant he had noticed Crowley's presence.

Crowley put the takeaway bag down on the table. "Well, I know you've been missing your sushi place…" he said.

The problem with nice little restaurants where they know you, was that they knew you, and as such, would greet you by name. When the sound of your name produced a skull-crushing migraine, it was better to avoid hearing it. Unfortunately for the demon formerly known as Aziraphale, they knew him almost everywhere.

Aziraphale put down his book and nodded sadly. "The takeaway place isn't quite as good, but it will do nicely," he said. "Thank you, Crowley."

Crowley grinned to himself as he moved the clutter from a table. He miracled two cups for the saké and placed them one at each side of the table. "It's not from the takeaway place," he said. "This is from your restaurant down the street."

Aziraphale took the bag from his hand and opened it slowly. "But they don't do takeaway," he said.

"Apparently they do for you. And they threw in a free bottle of saké. I never really liked the stuff, but I never turn down a free drink." They had been worried about their best customer, and more than happy to package up a few of his favourite items from the menu when they heard he had been unwell.

"What did you tell them?" Aziraphale asked a little warily.

Crowley shrugged. "Not much, and nothing that's technically untrue. I can be pretty persuasive when I want to be." It was literally in his job description, after all. He began to set the table, laying out the soy sauce, ginger and wasabi that had been packaged up for him. He handed Aziraphale a pair of chopsticks, filled two cups with rice wine and picked one up. He held it, waiting for Aziraphale to join him. "Cheers."

"Kampai," Aziraphale said. He clinked their cups together and downed his drink in one gulp. He sat down and placed the chopsticks on the table in front of him. "But, Crowley, you used my n… my former name?" he asked.

Crowley pushed the plate a little closer and opened a box to display a selection of sushi hand-picked by the chef. "Hard to name-drop without it," he said. "What else was I going to call you? Especially since you haven't chosen another one yet."

"I know. I will," Aziraphale said.

"No, I didn't mean you have to," Crowley told him. "I just mean you haven't, so I can't use it. Until I know what it is."

Honestly, he wasn't even sure he wanted him to. Names were important, names belonged to the people that used them. They were an identity, they shaped how people saw themselves, and stripping an angel of their name when they were cast out of heaven was, in Crowley's opinion, the cruelest kind of theft. Heaven may have given the name, but it shouldn't be theirs to revoke.

But it was done, and it was inevitable that Aziraphale would take another, and that eventually, it would begin to feel natural. Over time, his former name would slip from the former angel's memory.

It was easy to forget something, even something as important as your own name, when the mere thought of it caused pain.

Crowley fought down a burst of anger. Aziraphale was who he had always been, and it felt monumentally unfair that it had been taken from him.

Aziraphale looked up suddenly, as though startled. He frowned. "What is it?" he asked.

"What's what?"

"Anger. And sadness. Why?"

Crowley felt a chill. The angel couldn't sense love anymore, but he could sense other things now. Things that Crowley had always been aware of in the world around him.

It was a poor trade.

Aziraphale reached across the table, his hand rested on Crowley's. "Don't," he said. "It's okay. I'm okay."

Crowley wanted to believe him, but he couldn't. Sometimes, he almost could. The days when he caught the angel smiling. When he read books, and made tea. One time, he had served up cocoa with marshmallows floating on the top, and curled up on the hideous sofa humming a terrible version of a song that Crowley had only later realised was supposed to be Don't Stop me Now. At times like that, it felt as though things really were okay.

But other times, Crowley heard crying. Quiet sobs as though the angel was trying to disguise the sound of his distress. It sounded like loneliness, heartbreak, and fear, but by the time Crowley found him, Aziraphale always looked perfectly fine and denied that anything had been wrong.

The angel pulled back his hand, then ran the fingers of his other one over the smooth, painted surface of the nails. It had taken hours, and every nail file in the large packet that Crowley had given him, but Aziraphale had managed to blunt the razor sharp tips, and when it was done, Crowley had helped him to carefully paint them in pink with white on the tips. They looked almost like his own hands again, and Aziraphale hadn't been able to stop looking at them since.

He lifted his hand a little to admire them closer, the tip of one finger touched the cuticle, where nail met finger. The polish hadn't chipped, and it wouldn't, but there was nothing either one of them could do about the nails growing. Crowley figured repainting every couple of weeks would do it.

"Really," Aziraphale insisted. "I'm fine."

"Yeah, I know," Crowley said, because he could hardly get into an argument about how someone else was feeling. He pushed the takeaway tub of sushi a little closer.

Aziraphale picked up his chopsticks. He hovered the tips of them above the selection of sushi as he made his choice, selected a piece, carefully dipped it into the soy sauce and popped it into his mouth. "But names," he mused. "It's… difficult. Nothing sounds right. Nothing sounds like me. I've been Az…" he winced, deep and hard, eyes screwed tightly closed now, hands balled into fists on the tabletop. He gasped for breath, pulled off the sunglasses and ran his hands over his face as though massaging away the pain.

Crowley did nothing, simply waited for it to pass. There was nothing that he could do. When the former angel opened his eyes, Crowley filled his saké cup again and pushed it toward him. Aziraphale took it in shaking hands and sipped slowly.

"I've had the name…" he winced again as the word presumably wandered uninvited into his mind, but the pain appeared to fade more quickly this time, probably because he hadn't tried to speak it. "I've had it since time began," he said. "Nothing else feels right."

"It's got to feel better than what just happened," Crowley told him.

Aziraphale nodded. He finished his saké, picked up the bottle and refilled both their cups. "Perhaps you could give me a name," he suggested.

"Me?" Crowley was already shaking his head before he replied. "No, I don't think so. Way too much responsibility."

"Oh," Aziraphale's face fell as though he had been expecting instant agreement, and Crowley almost felt bad for turning him down.

"It's an important thing. You don't want to trust it to someone else," he said. "Especially not me, who knows what I'd come up with?"

Aziraphale pouted a little, in the way that he did when he wanted to get his own way. "You're not just 'someone else', Crowley. You're my friend. And you're good at names."

He wasn't. Not really. His entire existence he had picked a grand total of one name by himself, and it hadn't been Crowley. He didn't really use 'Anthony' except on those occasions where he needed a first name. Humans sometimes got confused when you didn't appear to have one. Try as he might, he still, after seventy years, hadn't managed to come up with something for the J to stand for. 'Crowley', of course, was at least a hundred percent better than 'Crawly', but he had never actually told Aziraphale that the whole idea for the name had come about when he had introduced himself one time to someone with a minor hearing impairment.

Aziraphale pouted a little harder. "Or, how about this? You make a few suggestions and I'll pick one of them. It'll be fun, and that way you're not actually making the choice, you're just… narrowing the options."

"No," Crowley told him. It had been a nice try though, for a second there he'd almost been tempted.

He didn't say so. That would only encourage him.

Aziraphale picked up a thin slice of ginger with his chopsticks and chewed it slowly, then selected another piece of sushi. "Fine," he said, but there was something in his tone that said that it was anything but fine.

"Look, it's not that I don't want to help," Crowley told him. "I do. It's just, someone gave me a name once, and I hated it. It took thousands of years before I finally shook it. I don't want to do that to you." Even the demons of Hell called him Crowley now, but it had been a hard-fought victory.

It was difficult to tell behind the sunglasses, but Crowley thought he saw Aziraphale's eyes widen in understanding. "Oh, Crowley, I trust you," he said. "Besides, if I really didn't like it, I'd just say no."

Crowley sighed, finished his drink and poured another. It was still a sore spot, and he was reasonably sure that if he hadn't gotten over it yet, he probably wasn't going to. If he was given the responsibility for naming another person, he knew for a fact he would spend years agonising over the decision and still not find the perfect name.

"They're not the most sophisticated namers down in Hell," he said. "I mean, snakes don't even crawl, we slither."

"That's true," Aziraphale said. "And you do it so beautifully."

He was still trying to sweet-talk him. Crowley rolled his eyes. "Exactly, so why the Heaven did they think 'Crawly' was an appropriate name? They might as well have called me 'Walky' or, or… I don't know, what other ways of getting around are there?"

"Fly-y?" Aziraphale tried, then shook his head. "No, that sounds ridiculous. Plus you have wings anyway, so… 'Swimmy'?"

"Swimmy, exactly. They might as well have…" he frowned, momentarily confused by where his train of thought had taken him. "Anyway, my point is, no. Not going to give you a name. You pick your own."

"Like strawberries," Aziraphale mused.

Crowley's frown deepened. "You want to be called Strawberries?"

"What? No. You can pick your own strawberries. I saw a sign outside a farm from the bus home from Tadfield and I thought 'what a lovely idea'. Maybe we should do it next summer."

Crowley smiled. It sounded absolutely dreadful and he could think of very little he would rather do less, but it was such an Aziraphale thing to suggest that he found himself agreeing without a second's thought. "Sure, sounds great. But don't you think we're getting a bit off topic here?"

Aziraphale sighed. "I suppose so. Of course, I do already have another name, one I've been using on Earth for quite some time. It's unfortunate that I've been using the other one too, but at least…"

"Wait a minute," Crowley said, thinking hard, "What name?"

Aziraphale didn't answer. He ate a little ginger as a palate cleanser, took a swig of saké, then selected another piece of sushi and popped it into his mouth. That done, he turned his head, as though making a show of looking around the shop.

Crowley followed his gaze, mind racing. Finally, it clicked. The shop. "A Z Fell," he said.

"And oh look, it's accurate now," Aziraphale said. He removed the sunglasses and placed them on the table in front of him as though to prove his point.

"That's not even remotely funny."

Aziraphale didn't smile. "I actually thought it was," he said. "A bit."

And it was, if you had that kind of a twisted sense of humour. But Aziraphale didn't.

Or at least, he never had before.

"It wouldn't be a good idea anyway," Crowley told him. He wasn't sure whether it had been a serious suggestion or an attempt at a joke, but still. "It's too similar." That name had been chosen specifically because of its similarity to his true name. It had been borne of it, and as such was linked to it in a way that would be impossible to break.

"You just said it," Aziraphale pointed out. "And it was fine. No pain."

"Yeah, but you don't want it reminding you."

"But that's just the point. I do."

Crowley closed his eyes. His own former name was lost to him now. He had tried to remember it, just to see if he could. He had known it would hurt if he found it, but he had gone looking anyway. It was gone. Not even on the tip of his tongue. A perfect, name-shaped gap in his memories, conspicuous only by its absence. He hadn't been relieved, or disappointed. He hadn't felt anything, really.

And that was probably the best way. There was no going back, and dwelling on the past would only make it harder.

"No," he said. "You don't. Just because it's not giving you a headache doesn't mean it's not going to cause you pain. Your problem, angel, is that you don't like things to change. You've been wearing the same suit for over a century; you read the same books over and over again; you saved the whole bloody world because you liked things as they were."

"So did you. It was your idea as I recall."

Crowley shrugged, conceding the point. "Yeah, and I admit it. I like things the same too. But it can't be. Not anymore. So if you've got to change, you might as well do it properly."

Aziraphale frowned. "But it's the name of the shop, and I have no intention of changing that. I've only just bought the website address."

Crowley raised an eyebrow.

"Well, not only just. A few months ago. I haven't done anything with it yet, I don't really know how, but I will. Maybe. If not, at least nobody else can use it for some… nefarious reason." He paused, then frowned, "Though I suppose that's the kind of thing I should be encouraging now, isn't it?" He smiled uncertainly, as though he wasn't sure he was allowed to joke about it yet.

Crowley shook his head disapprovingly, but he supposed the effect was ruined slightly by the smile that spread across his face as he did. "Oh definitely. Should be top of your to-do list, that. Somewhere between 'start wearing black' and 'nick sweets from kids at the park'."

Aziraphale sighed and ate another piece of sushi. "Well, I'm absolutely not going to start wearing black. It wouldn't suit me at all."

Crowley laughed out loud at that. He topped up their drinks and they drank them down.

"In all seriousness though, it's a perfectly good name, I've been trading under it for years now. It's written above the shop door, most of my customers already use it. And it's at least a little bit funny."

Crowley ground his teeth, still half-hoping that the angel wasn't serious about this. There was still a chance that this was Aziraphale trying to manipulate him into coming up with an alternate suggestion. It wasn't his usual style of manipulation, but it was entirely possible he was trying out other methods.

If that was the plan, it would be working, if Crowley could have thought of a single better suggestion, but he couldn't. Azir… Fell… — nope, he didn't like it, he wasn't going to use it, and the angel couldn't make him — Aziraphale was right; it was difficult.

Not only that, but the history he had with that name actually made it a good choice. Or it would have, if some 200 years earlier, the angel had chosen literally any other name for the shop.

"Well, you'd still need to think of something for those initials to stand for, because there's no way in Heaven I'm going around calling you 'Fell'." he said. It would be cruel. It would feel as though he was taunting him.

Aziraphale frowned, and for a moment, Crowley thought he was going to argue. He didn't. Instead, he knocked back another cup of saké and nodded. "I can try to come up with a first name for you to use," he said. "Something with an 'A'. But is it really necessary, dear? You'll just keep calling me 'angel' anyway."

He had a point. It had proven a tough habit to break, and despite one request that he stop, Aziraphale really didn't seem to mind all that much. Crowley finished his own drink. "Fine. And the 'Z'?"

Aziraphale frowned thoughtfully, then smiled. "It's just a 'Z', really."

Crowley laughed and poured two more drinks. He noticed that the bottle was almost empty and decided to fill the cups to the brim to use it up. "We'll think about it again tomorrow," he said. He had drunk enough to feel tipsy, and he wasn't sure, but he thought Aziraphale had drunk a little more. It wasn't a good time to be making important decisions.

"We?" asked Aziraphale.

He hadn't meant to say that. Honestly he hadn't. He sighed, then shrugged. "Sure; fine. You win. We." He could help. A bit. He just didn't want all of the responsibility.

It didn't matter anyway. Aziraphale could call himself what he wanted. He could tell everyone he was Mr Fell if it made him happy. He was right; to Crowley, he was always going to be 'angel'.

Aziraphale smiled at his victory, but there was something sad in the expression.

"You okay?" Crowley asked him.

The angel sighed, and nodded. "Perfectly fine, Crowley."

Crowley frowned dubiously.

"Really. I am. I'm just thinking that perhaps I owe you an apology."

"Oh? What did you do?"

"Nothing."

Crowley's frown deepened. "Then I'm confused."

"I mean nothing recent. Nothing new. But six thousand years of assuming you to be inherently evil. I mean, I knew you weren't as bad as Heaven would have me believe, but six thousand years of little comments implying that you were…" he paused, reaching for the right words. "That you were less than me. It turns out I was wrong, and I don't know if you can forgive me; heaven knows I have no right to ask, but…"

"Don't."

Aziraphale stopped. He swallowed slowly and nodded. "Of course. I shouldn't even have brought it up."

He probably shouldn't; forgiveness was a tricky subject for demons. But that wasn't what Crowley had meant. "I meant forget about it. Nothing to forgive." Crowley told him. "That's just what angels do. No offence."

"Oh, uh… none taken," Aziraphale said, taken aback. "But still, I do regret it."

Crowley shrugged. "Who's to say I'm not inherently evil anyway? Just because you're not."

"People who are evil don't behave the way that you have these past few weeks. They don't bring sushi to their friends from places that don't even do takeaway, or convince them to go out and face the world when all they want to do is hide away. And they definitely don't buy manicure sets, or paint someone's nails for them."

"They might, if it fit into their evil schemes. Maybe I wanted you out in the world so you can help me with all the evil-ing." Crowley smirked to show that he wasn't serious, but he registered a touch of discomfort on Aziraphale's face. "Hey, I'm messing with you," he added. "Like I said before, demons aren't evil, we're just good at getting people to make the wrong decision."

The angel visibly relaxed. "Still, I am very sorry for the things I might have said in the past. If anything good has come of this situation, I suppose it's that it's shown me the error of my ways."

"Great, worked out for the best then, didn't it?" Crowley said, working just enough sarcasm into his tone to ensure Aziraphale didn't misunderstand again.

"Maybe it did, actually," Aziraphale told him. I mean… obviously things aren't ideal, but it turns out falling really isn't the end of the world, is it?"

Crowley had told him once, in jest, that it wasn't so bad once you got used to it. He had never expected Aziraphale to have to find out for himself. "No, I guess not." He paused for effect. "That was last month."

Aziraphale gave him the smallest of smiles and Crowley could see his own reflection in his deep black eyes. The angel finished the last of the sushi and leaned back in his chair. "Yes. It makes you wonder what she's going to throw at us next, doesn't it?"

Crowley felt his eyes widen in horror. "Please tell me you didn't just say that."

Aziraphale swallowed. His gaze briefly met Crowley's. "Yes, that was rather careless of me, wasn't it?"

It was too late to take it back now, and even if he could, it wasn't like Crowley really believed that anybody was listening. If God didn't listen to a demon's prayers, she certainly wasn't eavesdropping on private conversations looking for excuses to mess with them. Probably.

Hopefully.

Crowley waved a hand dismissively. "It'll be fine," he promised.

He already knew there was no way he was going to be able to keep that promise. Even if nobody was listening, something else would come up; it always did. And they weren't finished with this yet. Aziraphale wasn't okay. He wasn't even close to okay. He couldn't possibly be.

Aziraphale picked up the empty bottle. Finding it lighter than he had expected, he shook it lightly, then put it down. "I have another bottle of Lagavulin, the sixteen year old not the thirty seven, but perhaps I could tempt you?"

He tripped over the word in a way that he wouldn't have before. The joke no longer slipped off the tongue, now that it was no longer a joke. It was a minor thing, but Crowley noticed, and it told him that things weren't okay. Not yet.

"As temptations go, that was an easy one," Crowley told him. "But yeah, go on then."

No, things weren't okay, but as he watched the angel swaying slightly under the influence of the alcohol as he headed to the kitchen, he couldn't help but believe that one day they would be.

* * *

This is the end for now, but there may yet be a sequel if that's something that people want.

Comments, as always, are loved.


	10. Chapter 10

_This isn't really a new chapter. Over the course of writing this story, I generated a fair few scenes that I either jotted down and then couldn't manage to get into the fic, or that for one reason or another I needed to remove. But I liked them, and I didn't want them to go to waste, so I thought I would gather them here in case anybody is interested._

* * *

So, at some point in the comments on AO3, someone mentioned contact lenses and how there is such a thing as contacts to make an eye that has scarring or something appear normal. Being evil, I wanted to make sure Aziraphale didn't get to use that, so I write out this whole thing, but ultimately couldn't work it in to the story.

.

The angel flexed his fingers and looked at the painted nails again. He sighed. "It's a shame you can't do the same for these," he said, and waved a hand at his face. "The sunglasses are almost as conspicuous as the eyes. Though I suppose at least they're less likely to send people screaming into the street."

Crowley hesitated. He recognised a familiar opening; an invitation to disagree and reassure. Aziraphale was asking him to make things better. He took a swig of his drink and shook his head. "It's a more enlightened age, angel," he said "People believe in what they see. They're abandoning God en mass." Not that it actually made any difference to Hell's figures; it turned out that a belief in God wasn't what got you into Heaven, it was more about the deeds you had performed on Earth.

"I don't understand. What's your point."

"Point is — and take this from someone who's been going around with snake eyes for six millennia — nowadays people that notice something like that are more likely to assume weird contact lenses than a demon living among them."

Aziraphale gasped as though in excitement. He turned to look directly at Crowley, and although he couldn't see his eyes, he imagined them wide with excitement. Crowley frowned, trying to work out what…

"Contacts…" Aziraphale said. "I'm not sure ones exist yet that could cover this up, but surely with a miracle or two, I could…" Aziraphale said.

Oh no. Crowley shook his head. He pushed the tray of sushi a little closer in the hopes of distracting the angel. "Not a good idea."

"Why not?"

"Too risky. Trust me on this."

"Surely I could try it. Maybe it wouldn't work, and yes, that would be disappointing, but what if it did? Can you imagine?"

He could. Of course he could. He had a great imagination, but that meant that not long could he imagine it working, he also had a good idea of the ways that it could go wrong.

"Do you know much about makeup, angel?" he asked.

Aziraphale frowned. "Of course I know that it exists, and its basic function. I've even used it myself on occasion. Well… several occasions. Why?"

"Back in the 50s, the makeup industry came up with this new stuff they called 'concealer', he said. "It's meant for covering up spots, bags in there the eyes, stuff like that."

"Yes, I do know what concealer is, Crowley, thank you." Aziraphale snapped, then winced at the tone of his own voice.

Crowley shrugged. "I happened to be going to a party — not my kind of scene really, but it was a work thing — anyway, tattoos weren't exactly acceptable in polite company back then, and ones on the face even less so."

He touched the mark on the side of his face as he spoke. It wasn't a tattoo, but humans tended to interpret it that way.

"So I thought maybe I'd try it out," he continued. "And it worked great too. Well, until I developed an allergy to the stuff. I'm talking blisters, itching, burning. Half my face felt like it was on fire. It lasted weeks, too. Demons don't get allergies; I never had one before, never had one since. Only thing I can think of is that demonic aspects don't like to be covered up."

"Surely…" Aziraphale began

"Or maybe I'm wrong, and it's just a coincidence. Or maybe some idiot at the makeup factory mixed holy water in with the batch and I got off lucky, don't know, don't care. All I know is I'm never doing it again, and you don't take risks with eyes, angel. I heard a rumour you like reading."

Aziraphale looked down at his hands again.

"Nails aren't alive, I didn't think they'd be able to do much about it," Crowley added. "Looks like I was right."

The angel nodded. He touched his carefully painted nails again, then sighed sadly and picked up his chopsticks.

Crowley bit his lip and watched at Aziraphale rested an elbow on the table and his head on his hand, and carefully picked up a piece of sushi with his chopsticks. "Okay," he said. "Perhaps the sunglasses will do."

* * *

This one was an early scene when the story was going to take a slightly (but not vastly) different course.

.

"I'm sorry. I should be handling this better."

Crowley frowned. "Oh yeah? Why's that?"

"Well, after all, I have been almost expecting this to happen for at least the past couple of hundred years. More, really."

Crowley felt his jaw drop. "You've been… Az… angel, what are you talking about?"

Aziraphale sighed. He leaned back in his chair and stirred his tea with a silver spoon that hadn't been there when Crowley had offered him the cup. "Not expecting. That was the wrong word. It implies it was a certainty, but… well… we all know what happens to angels that don't play by the rules. As for angels who consort with demons, who carry out _temptations_ for them… I knew that if I was ever found out…"

Crowley shook his head. Honestly, the thought had crossed his mind too, back in the early days, but he had just been having too much fun to stop. And then nothing had happened. For hundreds of years there hadn't even been a hint that Heaven had even noticed, much less got angry about it. Anyway, it wasn't like he hadn't been taking a risk too; he had always figured that if Hell found out what was going on, it would be the end for him. After all, he was already a demon, you couldn't fall again.

Word was, anyway, that the Almighty had mellowed a bit in recent years. She certainly seemed to have with the humans; it had been a while since she had unleashed a flood to murder untold thousands. Although to be fair, humanity had gotten pretty good at killing each other without her help, so maybe that was why.

"And then of course, recently, I've been working to thwart _divine_ plans, not just infernal," Aziraphale added. "It was almost a foregone conclusion."

Crowley took a gulp of his tea. He wished it was coffee, that way it would at least be acceptable to fill it full of alcohol. He needed a real drink.

"Crowley?" Aziraphale asked.

He shook his head. "If you thought any of that, then why did you do it, you idiot?"

The angel shrugged. "At first, because it was fun and because I wanted to spend time with you. And then because I didn't want to world to end. You made a very convincing case for that."

Crowley winced. His fault. Ultimately, whichever way he looked at it, he was responsible. And Aziraphale knew it.

"I knew it would hurt," Aziraphale added. He folded his arms tightly across his chest, and leaned forward slightly. "But I wasn't prepared for how much. Or for what would come after." He put his teacup down on the table next to him, and Crowley heart the rattle of cup against saucer as his hands trembled. "I don't want this," he said. "Oh, Crowley, I think I made a terrible mistake."

* * *

This got cut because I decided Crowley probably wouldn't tell Aziraphale about what he might scream at God.

.

"I keep thinking that perhaps if I could talk to the Almightly, perhaps I could get everything straightened out. Of course, it was hard enough to get her attention before, with the Metatron acting as a gatekeeper for her. But humans pray to her, and I'm sure she hears that. Perhaps I could try it."

Crowley shook his head. "Don't bother. She doesn't listen to demons."

Aziraphale's face fell and Crowley felt instantly regretted saying anything.

"Honestly," Aziraphale told him. "I don't think she listens to angels either. She's certainly never said a word to me since the sword incident. You've tried it then? Speaking… praying to her?"

What he did was hardly praying, only in so far as that God was the target of his pleading and his rants. It certainly wasn't something that the average human would recognise as prayer.

"You have, haven't you?" Aziraphale said. He was looking at Crowley with amazement now, as though seeing a side to him that he had never noticed before.

Crowley looked away. "I asked her to help you," he admitted. "I asked her to take you back, or if she wouldn't, to give you something to make it easier on you. She answered with a resounding silence."

He felt a hand on his arm and looked up to see Aziraphale's deep black eyes, wide with understanding. "My dear, don't you see? She didn't need to reply, and she didn't need to do anything. She _already_ sent me something to help. I have you."

* * *

A little bit that would have been part of something longer, if I'd pursued it.

.

Aziraphale glanced at the table, at the sunglasses still laying there, and something like panic flickered across his expression, as though he had forgotten that he wasn't wearing them. Quickly, he reached for them.

"Don't," Crowley said, and instantly regretted it. He hid his own eyes a lot of the time; it wasn't vanity, but practicality that made him do it, but he knew he would not took kindly to anybody trying to tell him not to. "Sorry," he said. "It's just, I miss your eyes."

Aziraphale smiled sadly. "So do I," he said. His hands closed around the frames, but hesitated, lingering there, touching them but not moving.

* * *

I don't even know where I was going with this.

.

.  
"That answers that, then."

Crowley frowned at the sudden change in direction of the conversation. "Answers what?"

"It does hurt. To fall from Heaven, I mean. I always wanted to ask, but I thought you might take it the wrong way."

"As a cheesy pick-up line?"

The angel — former angel — frowned, still a little addled from the fall. "Cheese? No, I'm not in the mood to eat right now."

Crowley shook his head. That was a first. "You only fell from Earth, angel," he said. "The fall from heaven is a little further."

* * *

I wrote all of one little tiny scene set in Hell in a 'verse where Aziraphale had fallen before I even had the full idea for this story. So technically it's not a deleted scene but a scene from another fic that never got written. But who knows, maybe something like it will work its way into a future fic or sequel.

.

"What did you _do_?"

Beelzebub folded their arms and stared levelly at him. "We didn't do anything, Crowley. You know what's not how it works. When an angel falls, it's becauzzze Heaven wanted it, not Hell. We did notice a new soul added to the flock though; it's been such a long time szzzzince it happened, these thingzzz tend to stand out."

"The _flock_? More like a swarm of hornets, you… actually, no. Flock's about right. Flock of brainless sheep. Well, flock off and leave him alone, okay? Or you'll have me to answer to. And don't forget, I can bring holy water down here with me."

A hint of worry drifted over Beelzebub's expression, then they smiled. "Yes, but your boyfriend? Aszz an angel he could withstand hellfire, but do you think he kept that immunity to holy water when he fell? Shall we teszzzzt it out?

Crowley raised the plant mister threateningly. The water inside it was not holy; it was the same water he had been using to water his plants the day before. "Stay away," he said.

Beelzebub backed off half a step. "We'll give you space," they said. "For now. Give him some time to adjust. But don't forget, Crowley, you bothbelong to us now. We'll be seeing you."


End file.
